Ubisoft will shut down its massive open world racing game The Crew in March after more than nine years. The other two entries in the series, The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest, will continue getting support and new content.
The team at Ubisoft Ivory Tower announced the first game in their series is set to close over “server infrastructure and licensing constraints''. The upcoming closure will happen on March 31, 2024. As of the announcement, The Crew 1 has been pulled from all online stores all virtual currency packs have been discontinued. Anyone who owns the game on PC,Xbox 360 Xbox One, PlayStation 4, or who plays through Amazon Luna or Ubisoft+ can continue through the server closure.
The Crew was originally launched in December of 2014,and if anyone bought the original recently is eligible for a refund. This should impact few people, but it is the right thing with a closure. The game itself stopped getting new updates several years ago.
The post came alongside a peek into the story behind the development of The Crew, which was the team’s first-ever game. At the time, they were a studio of 30 making a massive open world racing game. Now, they have grown, both in number of developers, but also in players.
“The Crew 1 enabled us to define the pillars of The Crew franchise: a social open world full of activities, an RPG progression system linked to the vehicles and actions players perform, and finally, guaranteeing players activities at any time of day. Thanks to the experience developed on these pillars, we reached over 40 million players on the franchise last year, something we are incredibly proud of. We would like to personally thank each of our players, without whom we wouldn't be here today.”