The Crew 1 Officially Shuts Down Servers, Killing The Online Only Racer

The Crew 1 was an iconic racing game, it’s huge map, car customisation, gritty story, to this day it is still one of my favourite racing games of all time despite it’s rubbish handling and the fact that it’s made by Ubisoft. Today was the game’s final day as the servers have been officially shut down meaning that owners of the game can effectively never play it again.

The Crew 1 Shutdown

4 Months ago, Ubisoft and Ivory Tower announced that The Crew was being removed from storefronts and its servers will be shutting down on March 31st which is today. If you go to try and play the game you will be met with an error message and you have no option of playing the game at all even in offline mode.

Before its shutdown many players hopped online for one final drive sharing various photos on social media, in a similar way to the shutdown of other game servers such as Need For Speed World.

Was there till the very end with friends 🥹
byu/ashkechum101 inThe_Crew

It’s obvious why this is disappointing, whilst the game is old and nowhere near as popular as it’s hayday, people still spent money on it and now they just own effectively a paperweight that serves no use except for watching the intro screen. There is no option for offline mode and as of writing Ubisoft have made no mention of enabling an offline mode because they’re, as we all know, somehow worse than EA. So I guess we’ll cry about it for a bit and move on to play the two sequels of the game which are arguably worse and will probably meet the same fate, or there are some other possibilities here.

Now currently there is talks of some form of a lawsuit against Ubisoft over this however I haven’t paid much attention to it since and I personally don’t see it going anywhere anyway, but the YouTuber behind this lawsuit Accursed Farms has since uploaded two additional updates on the topic. Aside from that lawsuit, there is a “server emulator” being worked on by the community to attempt to revive the game. Via a Reddit post from u/KFC_Crispy_OG in the r/The_Crew subreddit, a photo has been shared from an unknown Discord server that talks about creating a “Server Emulator”.

A server emulator for The Crew 1 is being worked on by the community
byu/KFC_Crispy_OG inThe_Crew

A “Server Emulator” is described as “a tool to answer network communications from a certain client (in this case, client being the game), and thus emulating the original server software”. They note that this is an oversimplification of the tool as it iwll require extensive networking knowledge, datamining knowledge, and knowledge of The Crew’s system and services. For now this is in very early stages and there is no saying of when we’ll see it available but the post notes that “it might take less (time) than most of you think”.

For now, The Crew is just another game lost to time, goodbye.