The developers behind The Crew Unlimited, a community project that aims to make Ubisoft racer The Crew playable again following its unceremonious shutdown last year, have announced a release date.

If you need a bit of a refresher, Ubisoft's decision to take The Crew's servers offline in March 2024 rendered it totally unplayable even for those who own a physical copy, due to its online-only nature. That's since served as the spark for the Stop Killing Games campaign we've reported on as its organisers have petitioned lawmakers across the world to ensure companies are required by law to put concrete end-of-life plans in place, when they decide to switch a game's servers off. It also set a group of Crewers off on a quest to make the game playable again.

For a year or so, The Crew Unlimited's devs have been working towards that goal. They've now announced a release date for their creation, which comprises of a server emulator designed to stand in for those Ubisoft took offline. As per an announcement on Discord from project lead whammy4, it'll come out on September 15th, 2025, and be distributed for free to minimise the chances of the publisher directing their lawyers to intervene.

"We were trying everything we could, anything to preserve the game," reads The Crew Unlimited's freshly published website. "We eventually came to the conclusion that writing a server emulator for The Crew was the best and only solution. This would allow us to effectively implement both an Offline Mode and an Online Mode back into the game, Offline Mode simply being a local server running on your computer while playing the game. Your local server, your local savegames, your game. No one will ever be able to take this away from you now."

The Crew Unlimited'll be grabbable from that same site once it's live, and you'll need to have owned The Crew on PC before to access it, as the devs won't be illegally distributing game files. You know, because that'd almost definitely result in Ubisoft's lawyers coming down like a ton of bricks. Though, the project's Discord FAQ does see them admit that they've got no way on their end of telling a legit copy from a pirated copy, so they'll have to let all players in regardless, which sounds far from ideal.

In a Discord discussion linked in the FAQ, the devs have made some notes about what works in terms of re-downloading your old The Crew save files. I'd say players may well be in for a tricky time getting things up and running. The devs say you'll need to start from scratch unless you only want to play offline, and have already used a tool they developed to dump your save prior to the game's shutdown.

Meanwhile, they also hint that their online server may harbour a few additions or changes. That said, the group insist tweaks outside of any new stuff would be limited to "technical improvements and careful rebalancing", and that they'd "never change the core experience of the game".

All in all, even though the project's been public info for around a year now, with whammy4 having posted videos of them driving around in it to YouTube, it's maybe worth waiting to see how the release plays out before you give it a go.