Ubisoft reportedly revoking The Crew from owners' libraries following server shutdown

Players are review bombing The Crew 2 in response to Ubisoft's recent decision to shut down support for 2014's The Crew. Nearly six years after its release, The Crew 2 landed in the middle of a heated conflict between the franchise's longtime fans and its own creators. The online-only racing game has since seen a spike in negative reviews, reflecting the tumultuous relationship between its player base and the studio behind the series' development.

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2014’s The Crew was the first project for developer Ivory Tower, which was founded in Lyon, France, in 2007 and later acquired by Ubisoft in late 2015. While it may have been the debut game for the studio, a number of Ivory Tower’s staff formerly hailed from Lyon’s Eden Games (including Ivory Tower’s three founders) and had previous experience on the first three instalments of the V-Rally series, the PlayStation version of Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, and the trendsetting Test Drive Unlimited. As such, there was a good deal of optimism around The Crew.

It's always sad to see a well-liked game completely shut down, especially when it was still being enjoyed by a handful of dedicated fans. That's exactly what happened with The Crew, an open world racing game that was released all the way back in 2015. Being a completely online title, once developer Ubisoft pulled the plug on the game's servers at the end of last month, it became completely unplayable for all owners.

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The games industry continues to hit us with depressing lessons of how fickle digital ownership can be, with everything from DRM to servers being taken down and more serving as constant threats to your ownership of games you’ve purchased with your hard-earned money. Another game is now seemingly hammering that point home.

The Crew, Ubisoft's 2014 racing game, closed its doors on March 31st. After that date, launching the game took you to a splash screen and then presented an error message when trying to advance, because the servers are no longer offline.

Ubisoft’s online-only racing game The Crew stopped being operable on April 1. Some users are reporting, however, that things have gone a bit further. They say that the company actually reached into Ubisoft Connect accounts and revoked the license to access the game, according to reports by Game Rant and others.

Some Ubisoft Connect users are reporting that The Crew has essentially been removed from their accounts and is no longer accessible. One noteworthy element of The Crew was that it was only playable online, which meant it was inaccessible without an internet connection.

Last year, it was announced that the open world racing title The Crew would be delisted from storefronts and have its servers shut down in 2024, as developer Ubisoft claimed it was necessary to do so due to "server infrastructure and licensing constraints." With The Crew being an online-only title, it meant that the game was made completely unplayable when the servers were eventually shut down on March 31.

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