Back in May 2024, in You Don’t Own Your Video Games! I wrote that The Crew would no longer be playable because Ubisoft was shutting down its servers for the game on 31 March 2024. This was quite a scandalous move by Ubisoft because the company didn’t even see fit to offer an offline mode for single-player. This provoked an angry reaction from the community and even a class action lawsuit. We all know that for licensing reasons, games are withdrawn from sale – The Forza series being a prime example – however, in most cases, if you paid money for the game, you would be able to download it and play it ad infinitum. This was not the case with The Crew, and if you opened the game, you would be met with this message:
Not only that, and adding insult to injury, Ubisoft revoked licenses for those copies of the game that were bought through Ubisoft and played through their crappy game client, Ubisoft Connect. It appears that if you bought the game through Steam, as in my case, your license was not revoked.
By around 2020, the game had over 12 million players total.
However, shortly after the server shutdown, a team of clever enthusiasts leapt into action and began work on a definitive solution.
The Crew Unlimited (TCU)
That team is The Crew Unlimited, TCU for short. In September this year, TCU launched their custom server emulator software that they began working on more than 18 months ago, thus making the game playable again.
I downloaded the TCU Launcher yesterday and, apart from having to make a couple of exceptions in Windows Security, the entire process was very straightforward, and I was playing the game again within a few minutes.
I had to start from the beginning because all my saves are on the crappy Ubisoft server, but I didn’t mind because it’s such a good game with an interesting campaign story that doesn’t appeal to the lowest common denominator. However, the legality of the offline server is a grey area, especially since TCU hasn’t modified, reverse engineered, or otherwise doctored the original game files. Emulators are an accepted technology today, enabling gamers to play games from different platforms on their PCs, with the biggest caveat being that your copy of the game is legal, not pirated. I bought my copy on Steam back in 2016 and, since then, put in over 72 hours of single player gameplay and wrote about it eleven years ago in Game Preview – The Crew (Beta).
Why Is Ubisoft Digging Its Heels In?
As far as I know, Ubisoft hasn’t commented, issued any cease and desist actions, or taken steps to shut down TCU Launcher, but anything is possible with big corporations. The very simple question of why Ubisoft does not modify the original game files for offline mode is a puzzling one. Perhaps the company doesn’t feel obliged to bow down to nobodies like us? As it is, Ubisoft remains one of the most detested game companies in the gaming community because it doesn’t listen to its customers. Going the extra mile and giving its customers what they are asking for would certainly generate kudos and goodwill in the gaming community, but I feel that is not in Ubisoft’s playbook.
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