Ubisoft’s Ambitious Open-World Racer Is Now Impossible to Play

The Crew shipped in December 2014 with a map of the contiguous United States, a 20-hour story about a framed street racer, and a promise that other real players would always be out there on the road with you. Ubisoft Ivory Tower and Ubisoft Reflections built the thing; Asobo Studio handled the Xbox 360 port. It landed on PlayStation 4, PC and Xbox One. More than a decade later, the most important fact about The Crew is not the driving. It is that you cannot play it.

Ubisoft shut the servers down in 2024, and The Crew was online-only, so the game became unplayable. No server software was released to the public. Ubisoft also pulled the license from people who owned it on Ubisoft Connect. A class-action lawsuit followed, and the Stop Killing Games campaign launched to stop publishers from doing this again. That is the headline. The rest of this review is about the game underneath it.

Trailer, via IGDBcom.

Alex Taylor and the 5-10 Motor Club

The Crew is a racing game first. The map is a scaled-down recreation of the contiguous United States, cut into five regions: the Midwest, the East Coast, the South, the Mountain States and the West Coast. Six main cities anchor it — Detroit and Chicago in the Midwest, New York City on the East Coast, Miami in the South, Las Vegas in the Mountain States, Los Angeles on the West Coast. St. Louis, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, San Francisco and Seattle are also in there, along with more than thirty smaller towns like Nashville and Norfolk.

It takes about 45 minutes of real time to drive from one coast to the other. That number is the whole design in one line. The Crew is not interested in tight circuits. It wants distance, and it wants you to feel the country stretch.

The story gives that distance a reason. Alex Taylor, voiced by Troy Baker, is a street racer whose older brother Dayton runs the 5-10 motor club. At a meeting on the Ambassador Bridge over missing money, Dayton talks with Dennis “Shiv” Jefferson, then walks back to his car. Shiv shoots him from behind and drops the gun. A corrupt FBI agent, Bill Coburn, uses that gun to frame Alex for the murder. Alex gets 13 years.

Five years in, FBI agent Zoe Winters offers him a temporary release if he goes undercover to expose Coburn and bring Shiv down. To do it, Alex has to climb the club from V2 up to V8, race by race, across Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago and every city after that.

A Country You Can Cross in 45 Minutes

The structure holds up better than the plot. Each region has its own geography, and the missions send you through all of it — solo, with friends, or through online co-op matchmaking. Multiplayer caps at eight players for races and other modes. There are no loading screens and no pauses, which matters more than it sounds. The world never breaks.

Skills Challenges scatter across the map. You trigger them by driving through them, then weave gates or hold a racing line for a stretch of time. Scores save automatically so friends can try to beat them, the same way Electronic Arts’ Autolog works in the Need for Speed games. It is a small system, and it is the best thing in The Crew. It turns empty highway into a scoreboard.

The Always-Online Problem

Here is where the game hurts itself. The Crew is always online, and the always-online requirement created technical glitches and other issues. The user interface is hard to understand. Microtransactions sit inside a game that already asks full price. None of that is fatal alone. Together, it made a game about freedom feel like a game with a hand on your shoulder.

Critics at the time praised the world design and criticized exactly those things. That split is fair, and it has aged into something sharper. The world was the selling point. The connection requirement was the catch. In 2024 the catch ate the selling point.

What Shipped, and When

Two million units shipped by January 1, 2015. Two sequels followed — The Crew 2 in 2018 and The Crew Motorfest in 2023. The franchise kept going. The first game did not.

What The Crew Is Worth Now

The Crew is a 6.2 out of 10. The map is genuinely ambitious, the coast-to-coast drive is a real achievement, and the Skills Challenges give the open world a spine. The campaign runs up to 20 hours and it earns maybe half of that. The plot is serviceable, the interface fights you, and the microtransactions were a bad call in 2014 and look worse now.

But the score is not the story. The story is that a game with a persistent world, a live player base and two expansions was switched off, and the people who paid for it lost it. That is not a review problem. It is an ownership problem, and The Crew is now the clearest example of it in the medium.

The class-action lawsuit and the Stop Killing Games campaign are the parts worth watching. If they change how publishers handle server shutdowns, The Crew will be remembered as the game that forced the question. If they do not, it will be remembered as the game that showed how easily a purchase can be revoked. Either way, the driving is no longer the point.

game preservation · online-only games · racing games · Stop Killing Games · The Crew · Ubisoft