Fans are bringing back the discontinued racing game The Crew with the project The Crew Unlimited on September 15, 2025 – including offline and online modes.
Imagine this: you start up your PC, open The Crew – and instead of the usual error message, you are greeted by a working server. For a long time, this was hardly imaginable, but that’s exactly what a few persistent fans want to make possible in the near future.
Because the story of the Ubisoft racing game was actually already over: At the end of 2023, publisher Ubisoft pulled the plug and ended support for the online-only game. Because The Crew also relied on running servers in single-player mode, the game became permanently unplayable.
Fans take the wheel
But now, almost two years after its demise, a project called The Crew Unlimited is causing a stir. Led by project manager whammy4, a community of modders has developed a server emulator that is set to be released completely free of charge on September 15, 2025.
The core idea is to make the game playable again – both offline and online. Those who prefer to race through the USA on their own can simply start a local server on their own computer. Those who want to put the pedal to the metal in multiplayer mode can use TCU’s online servers.
The project thus fulfills a wish that publishers such as Ubisoft and EA have tended to ignore in recent years: you can own the game, play it – and no one can take it away from you anymore.
Symbol for an entire movement
This is bigger than just a racing game. The Crew was one of the hooks for the Stop Killing Games petition, with which YouTuber Ross Scott criticized the practice of server shutdowns. Because it’s not just about nostalgia, but about the basic principle: do we really buy digital games, or do we just rent a license for as long as the provider wants us to?
Ubisoft itself made the lines even clearer with its legal opinion: in a lawsuit, the publisher openly argued that players are not owners. With the revival of The Crew, the community is now providing a counterexample.
Of course, TCU is operating in a gray area. The creators do not provide game files, only the emulator software. But you need a PC version of The Crew – and the software cannot distinguish whether this is legal or not.
But even if Ubisoft could theoretically take legal action against the project, the signal effect would be fatal: After the shitstorm surrounding the shutdown, a crackdown would only make the Stop Killing Games movement even louder.
