The Crew has already left its audience in a bit of a scandal this year, and the French publisher doesn’t want history to repeat itself with the two sequels…
We wrote that The Crew became completely unplayable after Ubisoft crashed its servers. This need for servers is also present in The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest, and after the first part became unplayable (there was no offline mode), many were annoyed by Ubisoft’s negligence. The company is also in a bit of trouble, as one of the shareholders wants to remove the current management team. So it’s no wonder that the publisher is doing everything it can to provide good news…
Ubisoft explained the removal of The Crew from digital stores and the shutdown of its servers to Eurogamer at the time, saying that server infrastructure and licensing restrictions meant that they had to get rid of the game, which at the time had been released for over 9 years. And yesterday, Ubisoft said that The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest will both get an offline mode to make both games available in the long run. The franchise will get more news later this year.
We have already reported on the Stop Killing Games campaign, and maybe that is why Ubisoft has taken this action, because many consumer associations have started to investigate the French publisher, because it is really not acceptable to spend 60 euros on a game and then not be able to play it later because its servers are unavailable, because the product you bought did not have an expiration date, because it is not food. And The Crew wasn’t really an MMO because it had a lot of single-player content.
In short, Ubisoft has gone bankrupt and is now trying to salvage what it can, because if it gets a bunch of fines from the publisher led by Ubisoft, its shares could fall even further on the stock market…