Soon after The Crew went dark, Ubisoft did something even more dramatic: It deleted The Crew from your libraries.
Allow me to rewind. Ubisoft removed The Crew from all stores on December 14, 2023, and announced the game’s servers would shut down on March 31, 2024. That’s three and a half months of advance notice for a racing game that had been released in 2014. Sure. Older games go away. Servers are expensive. We all understand.
What stayed with me was April. The community-controlled Stop Killing Games wiki reports that Ubisoft began cancelling licenses of customers that had paid for the game – no refund, no download. You’d look in your library and see an empty space where the game had been.
I believe this is when a geeky forum debate became a matter for the European Parliament. Here’s my simple proposition: if you buy a game from a company, they should have to tell you upfront, at the point of sale, what they will do with it when they take it down. Not hidden on page nine of some PDF’s wall of text.
Same problem, four different farewells
I arranged four always-online games in a row because the difference says more than any lecture.
| Game | Studio / publisher | Servers off | What owners ended up with |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Crew | Ivory Tower / Ubisoft | March 31, 2024 | Nothing. Licenses got pulled a bit later |
| Knockout City | Velan Studios | June 6, 2023 | A free PC build you could host yourself |
| Anthem | BioWare / EA | January 12, 2026 | Nothing |
| The Crew 2 | Ivory Tower / Ubisoft | Still running | Offline mode, added October 2025 |
Four games, one simple design problem, and four different results. The value of what you paid for now appears to be completely at the publisher’s discretion, years later. No one said that at the register.
The Crew, up close
You crossed through a flattened United States. Loads of folks did it alone. Didn’t matter. It still requested a link to the servers of Ubisoft.
According to the company’s own statement, the game “will remain playable until March 31st, 2024” and then will “not be accessible anymore on any platform.” All owners of the disc have discovered the value of a disc around here. It’s an installer for a game that talks to servers that have gone kaput. A disc with a logo on it.
YouTuber Ross Scott of Accursed Farms put out a video in January 2024 that grew into the Stop Killing Games campaign. In November 2024, two Californians who’d bought physical copies sued Ubisoft in a federal court in their state.
Anthem, the polite one
Anthem released in February 2019, and earned a 59 on Metacritic, and EA abandoned the title years ago. When EA finally closed the servers, it informed people: the announcement came on July 3, 2025, the servers shut down on January 12, 2026, premium currency sales ended the same day as the announcement, and the game left EA Play on August 15, 2025.
Credit where it’s due: nobody got ambushed. But check out the line in EA’s own FAQ: “Anthem was designed to be an online-only title so once the servers go offline, the game will no longer be playable.” Designed. That happened once, long, long ago, and the customers inherited it.
The two that actually did something
Velan Studios revealed in February 2023 that Knockout City’s servers would go dark, but before they did, Velan put out a separate PC “Private Hosted Server” edition so players could continue to play. Velan’s Josh Harrison later revealed to an audience at GDC that it was a “relatively light lift”, as development builds are often similar to private servers. VGC reported on the talk, including the community-led tournaments that persisted months after.
The other did too, in the form of Ubisoft. Amid the noise, the company said on 12 September 2024 that The Crew 2 and Motorfest would get offline modes (with plenty of angry comments). The Crew 2 received a ‘hybrid mode’ update in October 2025, according to Ubisoft’s patch notes. It’s not everything: no multiplayer, no crews, no Crew Credits buying, your progress resides on a separate save file.
Motorfest was promised the same thing. Since I didn’t come across a launch date anywhere that I read, I’ll treat this one as a promise, not a feature, until we see otherwise.
What the campaign really asks for
The phrase “Stop Killing Games” makes it sound like the demand is for servers forever. That’s not it. As Gfinity described, the ask is that publishers make plans to allow access after end of life for finished games.
EU version, called “Stop Destroying Videogames,” gained 1,294,188 verified signatures of the 1,448,270 submitted. It was delivered to the European Commission on the 26th of January, 2026. Parliament opened a hearing on the 16th of April and plenary session the 21st of May, you can find more on the European Parliament’s page.
And then Brussels said no
The full text of the reply was published by the Commission on 16 June 2026. According to press reports about the full reply, the Commission said that it “cannot propose a legal obligation to keep video games playable after they stop being provided commercially”, as intellectual property rights grant publishers exclusive rights. It also pointed at existing consumer law, and said it would examine the Digital Content Directive later this year.
The campaign called that “not unexpected,” and went on to try to get its demands incorporated into the Digital Fairness Act, which, as far as I can tell, is still being written. News travels fast: please verify before quoting.
Honestly? Just under 1.3 million signatures verified, and the answer was just a polite shrug in legalese. I wasn’t surprised. I was still mad.
The best case for the other side
Hosting servers is expensive. A modest game with a couple of thousand players can rack up hosting costs that outstrip sales, and someone has to decide whether to pull the plug. When The Crew closed down, Ubisoft blamed “upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints”. Third-party middleware, licensed music and cars all have shelf lives, and the Commission relied on intellectual property rights too.
That’s a reasonable argument. I don’t want anyone made to run a server for fifty years, and I wouldn’t want a rule to keep studios away from making online games.
But it’s not a hard thing to rebut. A small studio handed its players a build they could host themselves and left, and that was work done once, not a nagging billing cycle. And the licensing excuse works somewhat more for assets – a licensed song – than for code. Make it clear if there’s a time limit: do it on the storefront.
So this is my position. Cut the servers if you want. Give me the plan before I put my hand in my pocket, and give me a way to retain that which I have purchased.
Questions people keep asking
Are you able to get a refund when a game shuts down?
Not normally. When Ubisoft dropped The Crew, it directed recent purchasers to the store’s refund policy, and left it there. For Anthem, this EA community post I found says no general refund or compensation was announced, and that eligibility depends on where and when you bought, but the EU consumer law might help out here. (I’m not a lawyer, so read your platform’s terms.)
Will studios always patch in offline mode?
No. The Crew and Anthem got nothing. Knockout City and The Crew 2 did, and The Crew 2 only after all the fuss. Do not count on a patch coming.
Does a physical copy protect me?
Not here. The Crew’s disc installs a client for servers that no longer exist. The two plaintiffs in that California lawsuit had discs.
How do I spot a risky game before buying?
See if it requires an online connection even when you are playing solo. See if the publisher has previously shut down a game. See if there is an offline mode listed on the store page. Online-only gameplay even for solo games is a red flag.
Where I land
I doubt anyone at EA or Ubisoft got up today to screw players over. Most of it is spreadsheet mentality. That’s exactly why buyers need to know about this as early as possible.
Four essentially identical games, four different conclusions. No technical reason to do that, so someone did. And it wasn’t the person who paid.
Sources: Stop Killing Games wiki, Ubisoft’s The Crew message (reproduced by Delisted Games), EA’s Anthem announcement, Ubisoft’s The Crew 2 offline mode notes, European Parliament hearing page, European Commission reply, VGC on Knockout City, Gfinity on the initiative, Ubisoft Store refund policy.
