Ubisoft has announced that they have delisted the original The Crew from sale and taking the game’s servers down on 31st March 2024. As an online-only game, this will make The Crew completely inaccessible to play.
The news comes by way of the Steam store page, which plainly states:
All editions and additional content for The Crew are no longer available for purchase.
The game will remain playable until March 31st, 2024, for all The Crew owners. After this date, the game servers will shut down, which means the game will not be accessible anymore.
The game has also already been removed from the Xbox and PlayStation stores.
Released nine years ago on 2nd December 2014, The Crew was an ambitious open world racer featuring a broad, but condensed depiction of the United States of America – one of the most iconic elements was the ability to drive from one coast of the country to the other. It had a great hook, but was rather let down by an attempt at a dark and moody story being woven through the game, and more fundamentally, by less than amazing car handling.
These were elements massively improved by The Crew 2 four years later, which featured a spruced up rendition of USA to drive through, and we saw the release of The Crew Motorfest a couple months ago, which flitted across to Hawaii.
There’s newer and better options, in other words, but this again demonstrates the problem with always connected online games and the inevitable end to their availability. There’s countless other games that will similarly just disappear as the servers are turned off in the fullness of time.
In our original review, Dan said, “I really want to love The Crew. The in game world is absolutely huge and it’s filled with a great deal of content – it looks brilliant at times too. Although the handling takes some time getting used to it does feel natural as the game begins to open up. Despite that, the driver AI can be infuriating at times, as with the traffic placement which I refuse to believe is a coincidence. The online doesn’t feel well integrated either and the story is uninspiring. If you know that you have friends playing The Crew it could turn out to be a great arcade racer, but if you’re playing solo for the majority of it, it will no doubt start to feel lifeless and lacking a bit of soul.”
Source: Steam
