How dare people demand the corporations' absolute right to screw people over and treat games like disposable garbage be in any way curtailed. You make me sick.

I get where they're coming from but online-only DRM'd up to the eyeballs game are disposable by design:-

The Crew - "All versions require Ubisoft Connect and VMProtect DRM and a constant internet connection for all game modes".

^ With 3 layers of DRM (and VMProtect being the same virtualization / obfuscation based stuff as how Denuvo works), what's there to "preserve"?... The problem is, if those behind the campaign read Ubisoft ToS, Steam's 'Subscriber' Agreement, etc, they actually openly admit they are selling game as services & subscriptions that can be closed on a whim, so there's no real "mis-selling" going on. I wish them well, but it ultimately sounds like a group of people who've spend the past couple of decades happily throwing money at triple / quadruple DRM protected games, ignoring all the risks out of convenience, and are only just noticing / caring about it now that they've lost some favourite content personally. The time to "pushback" against 'digital' games being sold as subscriptions was about 20 years ago. The rest is just being "late to the party" of figuring out why DRM & gating single-player content online is obviously bad for game preservation in general...

Yes, pretty much.

When horse armor happened, that was a bridge too far.

DRM working as intended, I see nothing to report here. By buying games including DRM schemes, gamers are supporting that kind of move.

No, I will not contact my government just because some people bought a DRMed game and are now disappointed that the DRM has been used to fulfil its original design. There are dozen of thousands of DRM-free games out there that they could have bought instead of this "The Crew" thing (that I read about for the first time here).

When Half-Life 2 happened and required access to some unknown platform by VALVe cleverly named Steam, it was too far. Then other companies wanted in, and Steam took off. You know the rest. Now PC gaming, to the community at large, is synonymous with Steam.

After reading up on this the game is like a decade old. Just on that fact alone pressing this is going to come off as a little unhinged unless there were a substantial number of people still playing, which could be the case but I am guessing Ubi doesn't make the numbers public. It does appears it was still actively monetized with microtransactions at least.

Yeah I don't think this is the hill to die on here. It seems it was chosen because a lot of people bought the game. But then why not do something like Overwatch 1 even if it can't be reasonably expected to function without servers? The Overwatch 2 thing was blatant and it's not like the game was past its lifespan.

Why anyone would enable Ubisoft buying a game is beyond me honestly. It seems like racing games truly get the worst of it as far as planned obsolescence.

I also 'owned,' or should I say 'own,' The Crew on Ubisoft. It came as a bonus when purchasing a GTX970 video card, as I would never buy anything directly from Ubisoft. I cannot believe some people still protect this terrible, consumer-unfriendly company called Ubisoft by blaming the 'not-so-smart?' gamers for buying these games, or saying that the game is too old anyway, or has multiplayer features that cannot be fixed. Because of those people, Ubisoft can continue with these horrible practices. Also, whatever you think about Steam, it is not the case here. This is all about Ubisoft. What Ross is saying makes complete sense and has my full support.

He hates DRM way too much to support people doing something against it.

I have no problem with non-free games, it’s DRM I refuse to support. The hypocrisy of supporting DRMed releases then complaining because the DRM (that was never hidden in the first place) is used to restrict access to the game is something that will never get my sympathy.

DRM could not be commercially viable if customers refused to buy such products, and developers/publishers would be forced to drop it or go out of business.

By the way I actually used several Libreboot Thinkpads over the years, but even on these I did run non-free games.

Ah yes, the endless number of possible meanings and nuances of the words "free" and "non-free".

free as open source (non-commercial)
free as free beer (without monetary cost)
free as DRM-free (no constant monitoring)

non-free as Ubisoft
non-free as Steam
non-free as Microsoft
non-free as ...

So many hills to die on.
edit: cue William Wallace shouting "FREEDOM!"

Maybe I give people too much credit.

It's hard to accept that anyone with a working brain thought a game that required an internet connection would last forever.

It's also hard to accept anyone would think legal agreements on sales are up for debate. It's no different from someone leasing you a vehicle. If you don't agree to the agreement, don't buy the lease. If you do, you have to honor it. What you can't do is force the company to lease it to you on your terms or steal the car because you don't like their conditions. Or in this case whine after the fact that the thing you agreed to is not what you wish it was.

Bottom line is that if not enough people buy or play such games they will stop being made. These models only exist because people buy and play this stuff.

If a car requires an Internet connection to run, then the inevitable car crashes that result from a disconnection should rightly make the manufacturer bankrupt. With the lower stakes of a video game, the punishment should be mild. Ubisoft should get used to not selling games.

Dead Game News: Early plans for stopping companies from destroying games

https://youtu.be/DAD5iMe0Xj4?si=srCRUHA81YPal8Vj

I think that this video from Ross Scott explains further what is the motivation and expected result.

Timestamp 36:12 in the video addresses a specific concern of some people and gives a better understanding.

https://youtu.be/DAD5iMe0Xj4?t=2167

From what I gathered, The Crew is important because of the amount people who bought the game, first time ever critical mass, and are now denied access, with no previous mention of date of server shutdown before the purchase was made.

It is agreed some server end date should exist, that is what seemingly must happen, but it meaning literal end of life for a game that people worked on - developers, artists - is just a waste and unnecessary.

These games are currently impossible to be seen, just because they must connect to a central server. No other reason - files are on customers computer, disk is in drive, but no.

No expectation of maintaining servers forever, just for companies to be obligated by law to patch the game to be playable in at least offline mode.

Also, they say that what allowed this behaviour in the first place was a court case in 1999 in the USA, and companies just continued doing this in the rest of the world.