Highlights
- Ubisoft has delisted The Crew from digital storefronts and will shut down its servers on March 31, 2024.
- The always-online nature of The Crew was heavily criticized, and its delisting further highlights concerns about an all-digital gaming future.
- Gamers can expect more server shutdowns in the future.
Ubisoft has officially delisted The Crew from all digital storefronts and will shut down its servers on March 31, 2024. The Crew first launched in 2014 to mixed reviews. Post-launch updates and expansions made the game more popular over time, with Ubisoft eventually releasing The Crew 2 and most recently, The Crew Motorfest.
One of The Crew's defining characteristics is its always-online nature, which allows gamers to easily enjoy multiplayer content with friends, though it comes with some obvious downsides. The Crew's online-only nature was heavily criticized at the time of the game's launch, as server issues and connectivity problems rendered the game unplayable at times. Not only that, but it being an online-only game meant The Crew has always had a limited shelf-life.
The Crew Motorfest: Best Planes, Ranked
The Crew: Motorfest offers more than just cars with boats and planes taking up a decent chunk of its huge vehicle roster.
Now that The Crew has been delisted from digital storefronts, it's the beginning of the end for the racing game. When The Crew multiplayer servers are shut down on March 31, fans will lose access to it forever. While it's safe to say that many racing game fans have long moved on from The Crew, either to its sequels or other games in the genre, this is still a sad development. One has to imagine that it's especially heartbreaking for the developers who worked hard to make The Crew, as the game's lack of offline options means the game will effectively cease to exist when the servers are shut down on March 31.
When are The Crew Multiplayer Servers Shutting Down?
- Sunday, March 31, 2024
Ubisoft pulling The Crew from all digital storefronts and shutting down its servers is a reminder why there are many who are apprehensive about an all-digital gaming future. Almost all always-online games are doomed to eventually become inaccessible, meaning pieces of gaming history are being lost whenever these games' servers are shut down. The Crew wasn't the most beloved racing game on the market, but it's still a shame that it's been delisted and will soon be completely unplayable, even to those that already own it.
Gamers can expect more server shutdowns to happen as the years go by. Of course, Ubisoft isn't the only company that shuts down the servers for its online games. EA shuts down game servers on a regular basis. To its credit, EA gives fans plenty of advanced notice before it delists games and shuts down their online multiplayer servers, but that doesn't make it any less disappointing whenever an EA game has some, or all, of its functionality removed.
The Crew
The Crew is an online-only racing game set in a scaled-down version of the United States. It allows players to team up with their friends to take part in a wide range of races spread out across a massive open world. The game received two major expansions as well as a full sequel in 2018.
