Back in December 2023, Ubisoft announced that open world racer The Crew’s servers would be shutting down in April, nearly a decade after its release. Indeed, servers went down on April 1st as planned, but recently Ubisoft took things even further by revoking licenses from players, not even allowing them to launch the title via Ubisoft Connect.
This has been extra frustrating for fans since despite the always online nature of The Crew, much of it is able to be played solo. Ubisoft’s latest move has dashed hopes that Ubisoft might make some sort of offline mode available. There are fan projects looking to figure out a solution, but how that goes remains to be seen.
This unfortunate situation has just served to bring the discussion around digital ownership back into focus. A thread on reddit’s r/gaming subreddit has many gamers furious over the move, with some players even threatening to boycott Ubisoft’s upcoming Star Wars Outlaws title, which has been dealing with its own controversy as of late. On that front, Ubisoft has inexplicably locked the Jabba the Hutt Gambit mission behind its season pass, inviting the ire of players who are understandably angry over the company’s latest avoidable misstep.
