Devs behind fan-made The Crew resurrection project says it’s not their problem if it doesn’t work properly with pirated copies

A developer behind a fan-made project designed to resurrect The Crew say it’s not their problem if pirated copies of the game don’t work with it.

Ubisoft released The Crew in 2014 but shut down the servers last year, and because it was an online-only game this rendered it no longer playable.

The Crew Unlimited, which was released yesterday, is a free fan-made server emulator project which lets owners of The Crew play it again, either offline (by running a local server) or online (by connecting to the project’s new public server).

The Crew Unlimited works by taking the player’s original installation of The Crew and their saved games, and applies a patch that makes them connect to an emulated ‘active’ server instead of Ubisoft’s deactivated server.

To keep the project legal, the team requires that players provide their own copy of The Crew, because the team isn’t legally allowed to redistribute Ubisoft’s game.

While anyone who previously bought the game on Steam is able to redownload it, players who didn’t buy it before it was delisted are no longer able to access it. As such, some players are turning to piracy to acquire the game.

Now, on the game’s official Discord server (as spotted by RPS), the project’s lead developer Whammy has told those who downloaded a pirated version of the game that if they’re having issues getting it to work, that isn’t the team’s concern.

“After over 10 hours of non-stop tech support, it has come to my attention that a lot of you have acquired (by whichever shady method) broken/corrupted game files,” Whammy wrote.

“If you have acquired the game files from shady sources then we are not responsible for whether your game works or not. Players with legit Steam copies have had by far the least issues, no wonder.”

“Also to those who expect swift 24/7 around-the-clock support for them and them personally – I don’t want to say rude things in announcements.”

In an ongoing class-action lawsuit filed against Ubisoft last year for closing down The Crew, Ubisoft has argued that players buying video games shouldn’t expect to own the game forever.

The plaintiffs claim that because Ubisoft used activation codes for the game which had  2099 expiry date this implied the game would be around long-term. They also claim that the game’s currency system meets the legal requirements to be considered a gift card, and allowing gift cards to expire is illegal in California, where the suit was filed.

Ubisoft claims that players should have had no expectation that they were purchasing “unfettered ownership rights in the game”.