Motoring MMO The Crew is going offline in March, making it impossible to play
“Decommissioning a game, and especially our first one, is not something we take lightly,” say Ubisoft Ivory Tower
Ubisoft’s open-world multiplayer driving game The Crew will switch off its servers next spring, just shy of the series’ 10th anniversary. The shutdown will leave the car-based MMO impossible to play, with the game pulled from sale ahead of the move.
Developers Ubisoft Ivory Tower announced that support for The Crew 1 will be pulled on March 31st, confirming it “means that the game will not be accessible anymore on any platform. All of The Crew’s editions and virtual currency packs are no longer available to buy.
The studio put the decision down to “upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints”, saying the switch-off had become “a necessity”.
“Decommissioning a game, and especially our first one, is not something we take lightly,” they wrote.
The Crew released in December 2014 after seven years in development. The open-world car game offered up the whole of the United States (albeit in a fairly condensed form) for players to race across in a whole bunch of different modes, combined with RPG-like progression elements for your vehicles.
In fairly typical Ubisoft fashion, the first The Crew largely served as an ambitious if at points underwhelming template to build a better sequel on top of. In the case of The Crew 2, that “better” often meant “more”, adding the ability to hop into planes and boats as well as cars.
This year brought a third instalment in The Crew Motorfest, which travelled to Hawaii for a very Forza Horizon vibe in its off-road races in hundreds of vehicles - from F1 cars and supercars down to quad bikes, dirt bikes and a VW camper.
Ubisoft Ivory Tower noted that the series had hit over 40 million players as of last year, with The Crew 2 amassing over two million monthly players at its peak.