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Earlier this week we ran an important story about the games industry’s current trend of just expunging games from the annals of time when it has no further use for them. Either licences have expired and nobody deems it worthwhile to bother renewing them, or in this case here, it’s just decided to shut down the servers on the 12 million people who owned the game, maybe, if you are being cynical (not me obviously) because you have a new version in the pipeline.
A fan-led project is aiming to reverse the word Ubisoft did when it recently closed down The Crew by creating a server that the game connects to, rather than its previous now-defunct server.
In an interview with Eurogamer, modder whammy4 said, “We started pretty much as soon as Ubisoft announced the shutdown last December, It’s still the same game that everyone played before, except instead of connecting to Ubisoft’s central server, they will connect to ours.”
If you are playing solo you will also be able to run a local server on your own machine.
Whammy4 repeats the points we made in yesterday’s story about Forza Horizon 4, “I think Ubisoft heard enough criticisms from their customers, but I have one thing to say to The Crew’s community: they should absolutely not let Ubisoft keep getting away with such horrendous practices, otherwise it will just keep happening to more and more games, including The Crew’s sequels, and history will just keep repeating itself. People must not forget.”
And they are right.
“If the trend continues, in a decade we’ll have tons of unplayable, dead video games that people once loved and played, which is why video game preservation is extremely important before the situation spins out of control,” whammy4 said.
We’d argue it is already out of control with games able to be closed down on a whim. At least iif modders can keep games alive it helps with the preservation aspect, even if it is a bit like taking a photograph of the Mona Lisa.
