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From announcing a $130 edition of Star Wars Outlaws to pulling game licenses from those that bought The Crew, Ubisoft sure is on a roll this week.
The Crew was Ubisoft's open-world racing game that was pulled from sale back in December 2023. As of March 31, 2024, Ubisoft shut down the online servers for The Crew. This effectively made the game unplayable across all platforms, including: PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Amazon Luna, and Ubisoft+.
Though the game was rendered unplayable, it was at least still able to be launched. Now, Ubisoft decided that those that purchased The Crew aren't even allowed to do that. The studio has now pulled licenses for the game. This means that the game cannot be downloaded again, nor can it be launched. This also means now that any efforts to preserve the game, say with fan created offline modes or server solutions, are now also completely dead.
The license being pulled was first noticed by some players earlier this week and brought to light across various Reddit posts. Within the Ubisoft Connect client, a message appears at the top of the game's library page that says, "You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the Store to pursue your adventures?" The Crew was also moved to an "Inactive Games" section of the library. If The Crew was still installed on a user's PC, attempts to launch the game from the directory did work, but it only operated in a "demo" mode.
The Steam version is, at least for now, still able to be downloaded. However, any attempts to run the Steam version of the game results in a pop-up requesting the user to put in a game key to play.
Also, go spend $130 on the new Star Wars game.
Making a game unplayable is one thing, going into people's homes and stealing their purchase away from them, while definitely sounding illegal when worded like that, might actually be illegal in some countries, and we'll probably find out in the near future.