Delisting The Crew Makes Sense, Preventing It From Ever Being Played Again Does Not
2014’s The Crew was the first project for developer Ivory Tower, which was founded in Lyon, France, in 2007 and later acquired by Ubisoft in late 2015. While it may have been the debut game for the studio, a number of Ivory Tower’s staff formerly hailed from Lyon’s Eden Games (including Ivory Tower’s three founders) and had previous experience on the first three instalments of the V-Rally series, the PlayStation version of Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, and the trendsetting Test Drive Unlimited. As such, there was a good deal of optimism around The Crew.
While The Crew was a racing game of impressively preposterous proportions – with a map that spanned a condensed version of the entire continental USA – it was admittedly shy of perfect.
Its unprecedented size (an environment so big it took several hours to drive around) took a clear toll on its finer details, and contemporaneous rival racers like Forza Horizon 2 and Driveclub were far more handsome options. Its rubberband AI was regularly exasperating, with low-level opponents still able to rocket past high-level cars they should have no business keeping up with. It also had a surprisingly stingy economy, where you could find yourself at the level cap, out of story missions, and still without sufficient credits to actually buy any of its most-desirable cars.
However, despite this, its staggering size really was something to behold and, thanks to that, it was undeniably brimming with racing opportunities and exploration potential.
Of course, the operative word here is ‘was.’ The Crew was a whole bunch of things. But it’s not any of those things anymore.
Because it’s gone.
Long-time racing gamers are no doubt accustomed to the idea that their favourite racers won’t be available to buy forever. At least for games featuring licensed car models and tracks, there’ll be a wad of signed contracts somewhere that place a time limit on a publisher’s ability to sell them. Even the biggest racing franchises have been victims of
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