Ubisoft has delisted The Crew ꩲfrom digital storefronts, . As a shared world in which players interact with each other across a fictionalised version of the United States, switching them off will render the game unplayable. Forever. It will pretty much cease to exist.
Considering it first launched in December 2014 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC,The Crew didn’t even reach its tenth birthday before the harsh reality of modern gaming demanded its digital execution. Even physical copies that players likely picked up in their millions will soon act as little more than picturesque pieces of plastic taking up space on you🔯r shelf. I don’t want to try and pretend that anyone is seriously going to miss The Crew, but that isn’t the point here. It is important to consider the preservation of games regardless whether they’re masterpieces or disasters, since all of them act as pieces of history; lessons to be learned, not discarded.
The Crew received its latest e🔯ntry with Motorfest earlier this year - a game which has come and gone with little fanfare.
The Crew 2 released four years later in 2018, expanding on the open world premise with the addition of planes and boats as you play the role of a motorsport influencer cruising about the country in search of followers. It was agonisingly 🥀cringe and desperate to be hip, but also did well enough to justify years of seasonal updates and post-launch support. Who knows if 2023’s Motorfest will be afforded the same success, but what does it matter when Ubisoft will likely pull the plug when its us🧸efulness outweighs the costs of keeping the servers operational.
With little warning, a game that a development team spent years creating will fade away with no means of ever revisiting it. Even with a physical copy in hand𓂃, the always online nature of The Crew renders it inaccessible. It was created as a shared world with a temporary lifespan, ready to have its cord cut the moment profits began ꦍto dwindle. I imagine Ubisoft is also in need of additional resources and server space that a game such as this found across three platforms probably takes up a fair amount of.
From a logistical perspective, I totally get why a game like this is being shut down when nobody is playing it, but removing that option entirely is a crass indicꩲation of how profit-driven this medium has become. A game which isn’t even a decade old will soon be lost media. Mediocre or not, we should be mourning the loss of The Crew, or any game that can be taken away by corporations at the drop of a hat.
Ubisoft may have funded development of The Crew and brought it into the world, but like any piece of art, it grows beyond its origins and falls into the hands of the people, who are able to preserve it for future generations or tuck it away for a rainy day for💯 safe keeping. It seems we can’t do that with video games, at least not in the modern day when digital purchases or live-service titles become more and more prolific, when ownership boils down to a licence we haveᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ no control over. Physical copies of games used to be a way to circumvent that, although it’s not uncommon nowadays to purchase a boxed release and find nothing except a download code inside containing the very same licence that will come back to bite us in a few decades.
Previous console generations prioritised physical media to an extent where archivists have long kept their copies pristine or dumped all the appropriate data online, ensuring that even as technology fades away and games become harder and harder to find, there will still be a way to look back on and appreciate them. But as the developers and publishers responsible fo♚r the majority of games continue to change their ways and shift towards a digital future, the avenues we have to circumvent that erasure are few and far between✃. The Crew vanishing is not being treated like a big deal, but what happens when something like Fortnite, Apex, or a beloved expansion for single-player experiences is suddenly wiped away? When they are deemed ready to depart for greener pastures just because a piece of hardware is too old or their developers are running out of space to keep all of their junk? It’s a future we are hurtling toward and have no means of stopping such a worrying evolution.
