Are you trolling, or do you genuinely misunderstand every line you read?

No ene ever asked for indefinite support, only for mandatory exit strategies. No one questioned the right to make and sell whichever product you want, only the legality of claiming to "sell" what you are not selling and later eliminate all functionality from what people already bought from you.
It is precisely because they are selling (your words, not mine) something that they don't have the right to do what they are doing.

But hey, feel free to testify on Ubisoft's behalf on the French case...

I think you don't fully appreciate what a license is. All that was sold was a temporary license. The agreement makes that SUPER CLEAR. Ending the license agreement is a valid exit strategy as per the agreement. And anyone who did not wish to buy a temporary license should not have entered in to the license agreement.

This isn't really very complicated. Legally it's very cut and dry.

It's just that AFTER the fact, people are getting upset about the license being only temporary. But the time to be upset was before they agreed to it. Now it just makes them look bad.

But hopefully lesson learned and they'll look at the license agreement before making future purchases.

Nope, if it doesn't state its a lease or rental, in which case it clearly states for how long the lease/rental period lasts, a licence is perpetual, I suggest you watch Ross Scott's video.
It's legally not cut and dry, its a gray area and unless a judge confirms the gamercommunity can go fuck itself we don't know where we stand and gamingcompanies bend the rules just to see with with they can get away with.

It EXPLICITLY states the license lasts until the user or Ubisoft terminates the agreement. How do you not get this?

"1. GRANT OF LICENSE.
1.1 UBISOFT (or its licensors) grants You a non-exclusive, non-
transferable, non-sublicensed, non-commercial and personal license to
install and/or use the Product (in whole or in part) and any Product (the
“License”), for such time until either You or UBISOFT terminates this EULA."

Cute, thankfully EULA means nothing in places there consumer rights exists i.e. not America

Ubisoft is European.

If they concoct a licence that goes against the laws of ownership they can explain it to the judge and they stepped in a potential minefield. Because wether you own a digital copy of a game or a car or a kitchen utensil doesn't make a difference because if a judge judges that Ubisoft is right they risk opening the floodgates of corporations taking away all your rights, car, kitchen utensil, etc. Which is unlikely and which is why Ubisoft's licence is illegal.
Like I said, unless it states it's a lease or rental, which it doesn't, they technically stand no ground.

I don't see why you're shilling for those greedy bastards anyway.

Apparently you think the EULA was written by internet know-nothings instead of the legal team of a multi-BILLION dollar company :)

I'm not. I don't like Ubisoft. But facts are facts and I try to live in the land of reality.

Like I said, buying a copy of something means buying a perpetual license.
If Ubisoft or any other gamingcompany spends millions of dollars on lawyers to make us believe it's otherwise is their problem and their money.

OK well good luck with that imagination of yours.

I agree with your comments. This campaign seems to have good intentions, but it also seems misguided. They are essentially trying to outlaw the symptom, rather than the cause of the problem, which is online DRM being injected into video games in the first place.

The games were mortally wounded at the point when the online DRM was injected. It just took them 20 years to die. I totally agree. In the case of online MMOs, it would be good to see laws put in place to force developers to release the server-side applications as publicly-owned freeware, once the game is deemed to be not commercially viable. For the sake of artistic preservation, if nothing else.

One problem is that companies want to be able to resell the game in a different form sometimes decades later. Final Fantasy has been resold in different forms over and over as have many Nintendo titles.

Even an MMO like FF14 *could* have this happen as they've been making the game more and more playable as a single player only title over the years.

But if they give both the client and server away there would be no reason for anyone to buy it in a different form later.

A very wooly formulation.

Apart from that: once a MMO would be deemed to be "not commercially viable" anymore and therefore get released as "publicly-owned freeware", it may very well see a fresh upsurge in user numbers again...which, of course, would make it interesting again, from a standpoint of "commercial viability".

Edit: wrong wording

Sure. I was just throwing out an idea and I'm sure there are different ways it could be done, with regards to the details. Note that I didn't say the client app should be given away for free. It could continue to be sold on online stores, but just with the server app bundled in. I.e. they can still sell the game, but just give the server to the player base, so the devs don't have to pay to keep maintaining it.

Regarding MMOs: has there ever been a case where one has been taken down and then the servers re-started many years later by the developers? I have the impression that switching off of an MMO server after it has outlived its commercial usefulness tends to be quite final.

Well, I was throwing out an idea, not proposing that one sentence should form the basis for national legislation.

If an aging MMO is only going to see an uptick in users if it is made free, that doesn't sound like 'commercially viable' to me. If they are about to pull the plug on it then, pretty much by definition, they have by that point decided its not commercially viable.

The problem is, who decides when the server software should be made available? I wouldn't like laws that dicate what I have to do with my own intellectual property. If a comany wants to kill a game and repackage it to be sold again (Overwatch2 anyone?) that's their prerogative. You pay for access, once the company kills that access, it's done. If people don't like it, they don't have to buy the game, or its replacement. But people are stupid and will complain about rebuying a game WHILE REBUYING THE GAME. They deserve the gaming dystopia they've subscribed to.