Modders save Ubisoft’s The Crew, with a release date imminent

In an interesting turn of events for The Crew, modders are trying to save the recently shut-down open world racer, with a release date right around the corner.

Picture it: It’s December 2023, and Ubisoft announces on its website that it’s shutting down The Crew. Published in 2014, this Ubisoft game was an online-only racing game, with a persistent open world environment set in the United States mainland. Because the company is shutting down the servers, it is literally unplayable due to the fact that Ubisoft never released software to host your own server. And, what feels like a deeper wound in an already nasty gash, is that they even revoked the licenses of players who owned it through Ubisoft’s game library service.

Of course, some would argue that that’s fine, since the game is online-only and is shutting down, all you’d own is an electronic paperweight. The Crew’s shutdown is why the creator of Stop Killing Games, Ross Scott, created the petition in the first place. It doesn’t help that, since Ubisoft’s announcement, EA has given Anthem the axe, too.

This is where the good news comes in, as a bunch of fans have come together to revive The Crew. Originally reported from Rock Paper Shotgun, project lead, whammy4, announced that The Crew Unlimited (TCU) will come out on the 15th of September 2025. Fans can also acquire this for free, as the team wanted to “minimise the chances of the publisher directing their lawyers to intervene”.

How they’re able to do this is by using a server emulator, which will offer “both an Offline Mode and an Online Mode”. The way Offline Mode will work is by using a local server that runs on your computer. Their website’s about section even mentions that everything about this is something you own, “your local server, your local savegames, your game. No one will ever be able to take this away from you now”.

This is the antithesis of games nowadays, especially games like The Crew and Anthem, that are always online, or ‘games as a service’. Where, even if we use our own money to buy the game or the DLCs, we don’t actually own it. Funnily enough, this is the viewpoint of Ubisoft itself, as the company filed a motion to dismiss a complaint brought against it due to The Crew’s shutdown.

TCU has stated that you will need a copy of The Crew on PC to be able to use the servers. As, of course, they cannot distribute the game files themselves as that would most certainly get tricky (this is the grey aware of abandonware, a term about software that isn’t available to buy via “conventional means, or supported by the creator”). However, the server software they’re using cannot tell “a legit copy from a pirated copy”.

Here’s hoping that the launch of The Crew Unlimited proves successful, and hopefully, more companies out there supply software for fans to create their own servers, rather than do whatever it is that Ubisoft thought was a good idea.