The Crew Motorfest is coming to Steam soon.
As shared on reddit by user Turbostrider27, the game’s Steam page has appeared online. It indicates a release date of April 19, 2024. But that’s not all! In the page’s about this game section, Ubisoft has shared this description:
“Enjoy the game free for five hours!
Grab your ticket to Motorfest, show off your skills, and live the most thrilling driving experiences car culture has to offer!”
But everything is not OK when it comes to this release, as there are several layers of DRM attached to this release. For one, you will have to log on to your Ubisoft account. While some gamers will complain it defeats the purpose of buying it on Steam, in fact, EA and Activision do the same thing. Steam is just that big a platform that they get customers who only use the platform, even if they have to use those other logins on their clients.
On top of this, The Crew Motorfest has its own EULA. You don’t have to look far to find things not to like in the EULA, as it explicitly states that the game will collect your information, even monitor your RAM usage, and accepting the EULA functions as permission for them to do all these things. It’s either you agree to the EULA or you may as well not buy the game at all.
Lastly, Ubisoft has added an anti-cheat, called BattlEye.And this opens up the whole can of worms about kernel level anti cheat software like BattlEye, and Call of Duty’s RICOCHET. See, kernel level anti cheat is incredibly intrusive by its very nature, tracking your computer’s activity down to the kernel level. But, as many gamers themselves claim, it is now the only effective anti-cheat out there. Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege also used BattlEye, so that’s their precedent for using this.
Gamers should definitely take all this into account if they’re thinking of buying this game, but don’t let it dissuade you from at least checking it out. As Ubisoft points out, you can play the first few hours free, and it really is a fine racing title that is enjoyable on its own merits.
All this DRM also means the game won’t be running on the Steam Deck, so if you exclusively play games on that platform, caveat emptor. But Ubisoft may see a lot of traction for this Steam release, as it may have slid under the radar for console players. As much as Ubisoft tries, of course, the user base on their own Ubisoft Connect client will always be limited.
