It’s No Surprise That Ubisoft Killed The Crew

It was a cost problem, but not the way you’re thinking.

I’ve spent a lot of time with The Crew as a series, and I’ve been having spectacularly bad experiences since before it was cool.

Let’s start with the original title, The Crew, which Ubisoft recently banished to another dimension.

If you haven’t played The Crew, you may still remember when it made headlines for allowing players to “drive cross-country” (more or less), and check out your hometown along the way. Obviously it was at smaller scale than what we’ve since seen in Microsoft Flight Simulator, for example, but it was very cool for a mid-tier racer that wasn’t going to kill Forza or Need for Speed.

It was both open-world and online, but The Crew still had a reasonably decent story in a world where the Need for Speed series continues to bring in live actors to warn you that “Bro, the cops are coming.” and “Your old rival doesn’t think you have what it takes.”

It also put Arctic Monkeys on my radar, so, points.

Then came The Crew 2. I remember wondering why they bothered to call this a sequel. It had no story (other than “Bros, let’s team up and make racing special. Also, your old rival doesn’t think you have what it takes.”). But suddenly you could race in boats and planes. It was fun!

I didn’t just spend a bunch of time playing The Crew 2, but my young son also started getting into it. The open world meant he could just get set up with a car and go, doing whatever he wanted along the way. It was very much Racing As A Service, with changing events, a “Season Pass” subscription, and more.

Before I knew it (but apparently five full years later), out comes The Crew: MotorFest. This was a full-on Forza competitor, and was almost purely ia Racing As A Service platform. I’ll admit I briefly subscribed to Ubisoft+ to try it. I didn’t love the AI, and it wasn’t perfect, but it was cool.

The live service element, however, was insane. A while back, I got an Xbox Series S that lived in my office. When we moved, I put it in the living room without turning on the usual parental controls for an accessible household device. By doing almost nothing but pressing the A button too many times, my son accidentally spent $75 on in-game currency in under 5 minutes.

This was when I started writing about the situation. I had redeemed two $5–10 Xbox Game Pass Rewards gift cards that year, and Microsoft counted them as “refunds” against my account, so they wouldn’t even consider reversing any of the three transactions. I was just boned.

So, even though I’m now filthy with MotorFest currency, I unsubbed from Ubisoft+ and even cancelled Game Pass and Xbox Live until we’d made about twice that amount of money back. In short, Ubisoft is not making games anymore, it’s making storefronts. I’m not participating in it.

Now Ubisoft has a problem with The Crew as a series: They have footage floating around of admittedly impressive graphics, cool cars in lovely environments, but most players do not know anything about the series.

When you hear about a series you want to try, what do you do?

Well, in the case of this series, you notice there are earlier games called The Crew and The Crew 2 and go, “Oh. I guess I would need to start at the beginning. You’ll notice Ubisoft rarely makes the “2” mistake anymore. Look at Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Watch Dogs: Legion, and many others.

Ubisoft wants you in its shiny new storefronts. Pay no attention to those cheapo early games that made you a fan.

You could get The Crew for $1 at GameStop, but even if you spent $70 and played the series for 45 hours, Ubisoft would consider it a huge failure because, remember, you can spend that on MotorFest in five minutes. So The Crew was actually a huge problem for Ubisoft.

This in mind, The Crew getting yanked straight out of your digital library (and maybe no longer working on disc?) is no surprise at all, and I doubt The Crew 2 is far behind it. MotorFest is the optimized storefront, and they need everyone in it. This is the future of live service publishers.

We don’t like to talk about it, but Microsoft has done some of this with Forza, too. Looked for the older titles lately? I’ve come up empty for at least one recently.

Some say, “Go ahead and pirate, then,” but they like to say that about everything. I don’t think it’s that simple. “Refuse to participate in their cash grab ecosystem,” is a lot closer.