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Ubisoft has been in the eye of the storm in several occasions, be it for one reason or another, but one of the most recent events that brought forth the disdain of the fanbase towards the gaming company was the complete delisting of the game "The Crew" from all available platforms.

Back in December 14th, 2023, Ubisoft released a post detailing that the very first game in the franchise "The Crew" would effectively have all of its servers shut down, with the deadline being March 31st, 2024. Alongside this, the game would be delisted from all online stores, including PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Amazon Luna and Ubisoft+, with Ubisoft offering a direct link for steps to request a refund. Ubisoft cited "upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints" as the main reasons to delist the game online.

The deadline came around and now the game is currently unavailable in any official manner.

Three months later, a community of devoted gamers have worked on a private server emulator for the game at hand, and on June 20th, 2024, they released a video showcasing what they called the "First Roadtrip After the Shutdown", which is a roadtrip from Detroit all the way to Black Hills in-game.

The full 15 mins video of the complete roadtrip is shown, and the custom server that "The Crew Unlimited" group has put together shows a great amount of dedication and passion for a now unsupported and abandoned game. The server emulator isn't public yet, but those interested can checkout the progress and upcoming news about the server in The Crew Unlimited Discord server.

The Crew Unlimited Discord server

 

[ZeroFX]

The various avenues that are being pursued by this are actually making good progress, but (as expected) it may take longer than two months for the various legal and governmental initiatives across multiple countries to conclude. And yeah, I have already taken the actions laid out on the website and I'd encourage others interested to do the same.

Red herring sure seems tasty for you.

 

[Ferris1000]

But how do you expect us to legally play it when Ubisoft revoked/stole our licenses?

 

[Jonna]

Games got so much worse problems right now with dei and they come up with some campaign that completely ignores it...

What does the DEI issue have to do with this campaign?

 

[twocows]

I'm almost puking, your campaign did nothing. And follow your own "advice".

I don't even disagree with you that over-the-top "DEI" initiatives in gaming can be problematic, but it's not as though you can only pursue one problem at a time. People have different passions and will inevitably pursue different problems. Publishers killing games is a very real problem. And as for "the campaign doing nothing," the legal process in most places takes a long time to play out. It's not something that's going to fix itself overnight. There's no need for this sort of attitude, it doesn't help anything.

Fan projects like this are important for preservation purposes at the very least and it's important to try and carve out legal exemptions that allow them to exist.

 

[LightBeam]

The campaign is still going and making progress, but it was never about getting a server emulator going for The Crew anyway. Its a good thing that some games have such dedicated communities that they will put in the huge amount of work to reverse engineer the game, but this is not always possible. Its only going to get rarer as well, as security and encryption get tighter. Not to mention the absolute death sentence that is game streaming.

I think The Crew would have had the emulator made regardless, its a popular game and the "server" should be relatively simple. The ideal outcome of the campaign on the other hand would be for server emulation to not require significant reverse-engineering, just release the relevant documentation and server files when support ends.

In the case of The Crew, it'd be even simpler - this didnt need to be an online game, and traces of an offline mode exist in the games data. Ubisoft could just release a patch to make it no longer require the online connection. But they're not gonna do that if they can get away with just breaking the game instead in the hopes you'll buy another.

I thought it was on a « halt » of some sort so mb

I know the point wasn't to get a server emulator running, and my intent wasn't to diminish the action taken. I even took some actions myself, especially since I live in France and there's quite a lot of options that are listed on the website

But it's been quite a while now iirc, how does it progress aside from the server emulator ? Did Ubisoft even flinch or acknowledge the interest of people towards the preservation of their game ?

 

[Exnor]

This is just another reason to not buy Ubisoft games until they stop treating their costumers like s**t.

 

[Hells Malice]

Leading up to the server closure the game had like 50 players and only spiked to like 150 for the final day.

No one is going to use or care about a crappy fanmade server. Everyone moved to The Crew 2 where people actually play.

 

[Sir Tortoise]

I thought it was on a « halt » of some sort so mb

I know the point wasn't to get a server emulator running, and my intent wasn't to diminish the action taken. I even took some actions myself, especially since I live in France and there's quite a lot of options that are listed on the website

But it's been quite a while now iirc, how does it progress aside from the server emulator ? Did Ubisoft even flinch or acknowledge the interest of people towards the preservation of their game ?

Oh, "halt" is fair enough, I just wanted to mention it hadn't ended. France in particular is the most likely to succeed by far, but its just the nature of this sort of thing that there's going to be a lot of waiting for things to proceed through various agencies, waiting for responses etc.

As a summary of the most recent updates:

Direct responses from Ubisoft: they'll stick to their guns until forced otherwise. But apparently some person from a PR firm that has previously worked for Ubisoft was snooping around an unofficial Discord, which is hilarious if thats what it looks like.

France: their consumer protection agency has confirmed they're looking into it, and that it's taking longer than usual because of the complexity of the issue. So they've assigned it to their central administration, "the highest level where most complaints submitted to the DGCCRF never go" in their own words. So thats promising but will take time.

UK: government petition was approved, got a very confused response that had one potentially huge lead regardless. A government watchdog noticed the response was generally lacking though and referred it to be re-assessed. But then everything got suspended for the election so we have to wait for that to finish until anything can resume.

EU Parliament: members of parliament got directly involved and got a response from the EU commission on the legality of all this. The response was very unhelpful, outright refusing to answer one of the core parts. The takeaway is probably just that existing law doesn't cover this situation and they dont want to take a stance themselves. This was a surprise bonus route anyway, maybe something can be done with it but probably not.

Germany: their consumer protection agency is aware of the issue but no other details.

Canada, Australia: awaiting responses to petitions. In Australia, a law firm has been hired to raise a direct complaint to their consumer protection agency, but slowly.

Brazil: I think they're looking into the logistics of raising a class action lawsuit there, depending on funding and how many people they can get.

 

[LightBeam]

France: their consumer protection agency has confirmed they're looking into it, and that it's taking longer than usual because of the complexity of the issue. So they've assigned it to their central administration, "the highest level where most complaints submitted to the DGCCRF never go" in their own words. So thats promising but will take time.

That's to be expected from french ppl


Thanks a lot for your detailed answer, pretty weird behavior from the EU parliament tbh, but at least things are moving in different countries and I believe that France could be the major decisive factor when it comes to offering « reparations », just like it was when France fined Steam for their return policy back then, and we all benefited from it (tho we couldn't get the right to resell games, that would have been too good to be true lol)

 

[osaka35]

Games got so much worse problems right now with dei and they come up with some campaign that completely ignores it...

you've got the wrong impression. watch his video explaining it.

 

[ShadowOne333]

Seems like other games are starting to go towards this "trend" of being delisted.

I've heard Forza 4 will also follow suit.