Ubisoft's shutdown of The Crew last year promptly spiraled into a massive consumer rights campaign demanding publishers build failsafes to prevent always-online games from becoming completely unplayable when they're no longer supported.
While it seems the publisher has no intentions of updating the original racing game to bring it back to life, its sequels are getting offline modes, and Ubisoft has just published an update on what to expect from these new options.
"We are pleased to confirm that we are aiming to deploy a new hybrid way to play the game before the end of 2025 for all The Crew 2 players," producer Gregory Corgie says in a new video. A similar update for Motorfest is coming later.
What does "hybrid" mean? That's not entirely clear, though it'll apparently let you "switch between online and offline" as you like. Corgie notes that "The Crew 2 has originally been developed to be played online" and "thus, we will need to adapt the experience." As a result, the devs will be running several tests to "refine and balance the content" of this offline mode, starting with an April 30 beta on PC.
"We would like to clarify the difference between decommissioning a game and deploying an offline mode," Corgie also says.
"Decommissioning occurs when all online features and infrastructure for a game are no longer available due to various reasons. An offline mode, on the other hand, allows you to launch and access the game even if the server are inaccessible."
I'm not sure who out there was confused about the difference between shutting down a game and developing a new feature for it, but at least one thing is clear – while The Crew 2 and Motorfest are getting offline modes, the original Crew has definitely been decommissioned.
The shutdown of The Crew in 2024 inspired the Stop Killing Games initiative, which has coalesced around a European Citizens' Initiative that's collected 437,538 signatures. That's a massive amount of support, but it's still well short of the 1 million signatures needed to bring the issue before EU lawmakers.
Nonetheless, all the concerns about the death of The Crew have been enough to get Ubisoft to invest in offline modes for its sequels. These offline modes were first announced just a few weeks after the EU petition started getting traction, and Ubisoft notes that "we have been reading your comments" in the description of today's video. That's some progress, at least.
Ubisoft's lawyers are being a lot less friendly in a recent lawsuit rebuttal: they say you "cannot complain" the publisher shut down The Crew because you never actually owned it, and you weren't "deceived" by the lack of an offline version "to access a decade-old, discontinued video game."
