If you're an EU citizen, please take the time to sign this citizen initiative to stop killing games. It could be our best chance of preventing such situations in the future.
This guy's strawman arguments have already been destroyed by plenty of people who actually know what they're talking about and don't have an interest in keeping the current situation.
The guy who won't go 5 seconds without flashing his "20 years of service to Blizzard" badge also was dumbfounded at the possibility of people self hosting game servers like World of Warcraft, even though they've been doing it for years. Dude seems like a MASSIVE know it all.
Last week I downloaded Dark Age of Camelot which I have not played nor paid for 20 years, and my character was still there. I was really not expecting them to keep the data for so long without any payment.
If you buy a game, which you cannot use in single player mode, without internet access, you are signing up for this happening to you too, one day, guaranteed.
I mean, that's basically all AAA games in 2024. Even songs PC ports which historically avoided DRM and network requirements is starting to mandate PSN accounts. I 100% would prefer to be able to play offline, more often than not it's unwanted telemetry or BS bloat but that isn't something we as users can enforce.
It gets to be way harder to argue in court when it isn't a "clean kill", using Ross Scott's words, so The Crew is going to be one of the best examples we'll ever get for courts to rule on. I expect Ubisoft would rather settle than let this one go that far though.
I imagine a lawsuit would likely bring up the topic of how hard it would be for a developer to keep the game around past purchase.
For instance, imagine a massively multiplayer online game; everyone playing the game is acutely aware of how much server hardware is needed to maintain that online presence, and it's unrealistic to assume it would exist forever.
That's probably why attention was pushed onto The Crew. It's a racing game that shouldn't need much from a server, so it's arguably unfair to tie it to that access and take it offline.
Pirates have managed to run servers for tons of MMOs. The only thing stopping people from running servers themselves is that they're not made available.
Don't get it wrong, the reason The Crew was the perfect game to start the movement is solely because Ubisoft is french, a country that has pretty strong consumer laws that they aren't respecting.