Yet another fantastic reason to never purchase a live service game.
Ubisoft are once again pulling the plug on the online services for one of its games, this time being 2014’s The Crew, which released nine years ago for PC including XBOX 360 and XBOX ONE systems as well as the PlayStation 4, with the open-world racing title being an online-only release its shutdown was inevitable given how Ubisoft has since moved on with various sequels of the franchise.
The game is no longer available for purchase on Steam and the PlayStation Store, although it remains accessible in certain regions and on the Xbox Store. This pertains to both the base game and various editions and DLCs.
Which is even more ironic given how games like Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and now The Crew, which are more or less single player only experiences have content withheld from the end user simply due to Ubisoft shutting down specific servers, or in this case your entire access to the single player focused “MMO” has been restricted entirely.
Even if you had previously purchased the game, playing it is no longer an option. As per the information on the Steam page, the game will remain accessible until March 31, 2024, following which the servers will be permanently shut down. Given that The Crew requires an online connection, it becomes inaccessible after this date.
Much akin to how Ubisoft have previously stole DLC add-on content from paying customers by shutting down the option to authenticate in its older titles with their servers essentially barring paying players from accessing their digital content
This is a personal loss for me, as I could have continued to use the game as part of my benchmarking arsenal. Unfortunately, that won’t be the case as the game dies with an unceremonious whisper, an offline patch has allegedly been in the works since October 2023 however it has a long ways to go before being a viable option.
This is the unfortunate downside to modern gaming and digitized media as a whole, you don’t own jack shit, rather than buying to own you are effectively paying for an indefinite license of access which can and will be revoked at a moments notice simply because your account had been banned because you said some horrific things in an online game such as “shut the fuck up” or maybe in this case the publishers themselves no longer see the value in maintaining the online services for their long and forgotten releases that require a constant internet connection to function.
There is nothing more cancerous and anti-consumer when it comes to modern gaming than “always online” requirements where paying customers simply get bent over and robbed, games as a service has been nothing but detrimental for video gaming as a whole and consumers best interests.
Either way, majority of modern games are built around the basis of being a live service with always-online functionality, GaaSlop as I prefer to call them.
Especially games that actually demand an asking price to boot on-top of being online-only experiences, it’s only a matter of time before many such games collect enough dust before they’re shut down and removed entirely.
Making your $60 purchases completely and utterly worthless less than a decade later while prehistoric CD-ROMs from twenty years ago remain entirely accessible and “playable”, as the old saying goes, you’ll own nothing but at least you’ll be happy.
2024 will mark the end for not just The Crew from being playable, but Sony will be pulling the online-only proverbial carpet from beneath Grand Turismo Sport on January 31st 2024, and we cannot forget the 2015 reboot of EA’s Need for Speed franchise which is another single player oriented title that has an online-only requirement, at some point in the near future I believe that Electronic Arts will opt to euthanize 2015’s Need for Speed shutting it down for good.
