Ubisoft really doesn't want you to own your games.

I realize that I'm the only lunatic on these boards who actually cares about The Crew at this point, but while I do think the game has/had some merit, it's not really about The Crew. It's about games preservation and ownership and just games in general.

Ubisoft is taking the vanguard in the position that not only should you not own your games, which from a legal perspective you haven't for quite some time (instead you own a license) but that the companies should maintain total control over them. They should be able to revoke access whenever they want, with or without warning, for no reason at all. With something like The Crew there is at least a little bit of logic in that it's an online only game (even though there was no reason for it to be) and once the servers are down there's no way to play it. However you could still boot up the menus and in theory fans could put together servers in the future, as they have for other games in the past. Ubisoft's desire to stop anyone from having any fun with the thing they bought once Ubisoft decides funtimes are over is presumably why they revoked the licenses, but it goes deeper than that.

The real issue here is that Ubisoft is building more and more online components into even single player games. For now their single player games require a patch from servers in order to work, even if you bought the physical. That means that if the servers some day go down your disc will be useless, let alone your purchased license. And it seems like Ubisoft is planning on building online components into Assassin's Creed games in the future so they may not even be playable offline even if they are primarily single player. They may decide that if fans don't want to stop playing Black Flag and instead pony up for their horrible Skull and Bones game then they will be forced to stop playing Black Flag.

This seems spectacularly short sighted and like a great way to antagonize your most loyal fans, but it's the path Ubisoft has chosen, and if it works for them then others will follow suit. Game companies seem really excited about the idea of being able to take away our games, and as someone who has played his PS3 and games I bought for it a very long time ago as recently as a couple days ago this makes me both angry and nervous. It just feels like the big game publishers are more and more antagonistic towards their playerbases, angry that they can't extract the revenue that their projections say they should be able to from their games, regardless of quality. Whether it's doubling down on live services immediately after the market rejects two big games, jacking up prices (Ubisoft now wants $130 for their most premium version of their new Star Wars game) or this new era of "games are always online and we can shut them down whenever we feel like it" none of it feels good, and it will eventually make even the "casuals" think twice about buying games.

Of course that may be what Ubisoft wants. They want people to subscribe to their Ubisoft service the same way that they do streaming services. The problem is that the value proposition sucks. Ubisoft releases a few big games a year, many of which are not really worth playing, and they want $18 a month for the privilege of playing Skull & Bones and whatever games they bother leaving up from their back catalog. It's a brave, new, horrible, world, and the shutdown and revocation of the Crew is a portent of things to come.

Right now I'm playing through Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within, and doing it off a PS3 disc I bought a long time ago. Ubisoft wishes it could stop me. In the future it may be able to.

I don't think this is going to work out the way these companies hope it will, but for now the mainstream industry seems hell bent on forcing its restrictive, destructive, vision on gamers. Ubisoft doesn't care about its games or its customers, only its profits, but what it doesn't seem to understand is that if they keep antagonizing those customers eventually they will go elsewhere, whether that's to other gaming companies or the digital high seas. You're not going to teach people not to care when you take away things they've paid for. You're going to teach them to stop giving you money.

Weird. I also think people shouldn't own Ubisoft games. Finally. A move from Ubisoft I can get behind.

I can tell why Ubisoft refuses to release an offline patch for The Crew 1 because they force players to jump onto The Crew 2 or The Crew Motorfest instead, they're so mean.

@gtxforza: I'd imagine it's either an incredibly small number still playing to not be worth the time/effort, or an offline mode would be more work than we realize to the point it may even not be possible. Ubisoft could also be full evil forcing people to the Crew 2, likely a mix of all three.

@thepanzini: It's never about the number of people playing it's about the number of people spending. If people are booting up the game just to enjoy it but not buying microtransactions that just costs them money.

I award zero credit for it being hard to build an offline patch. It might, in fact, be really really hard, but they chose to make the game the way they did. It's like building a nightclub with very thin walls and then when neighbors complain it's too loud arguing that it would be hard and expensive to add sound dampening. Ubisoft created this problem. Which, of course, they don't see as a problem because this was always the intent. If they wanted to make a game people could keep playing with the servers off they would have built it the way the Forza Horizon games were built.

But none of this excuses revoking people's licenses. That's nearly unprecedented for paid games on a digital marketplace.

@bigsocrates: Playing/spending was implying the same thing, didn't comment on fault but until proven otherwise I'd always pick stupidity.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

@thepanzini: I think the playing/spending issue is important because pulling something down because people weren't playing seems a lot less greedy than pulling it down if people were playing (a game they paid for, mind you) but not spending enough additional money.

I give Ubisoft absolutely no benefit of the doubt given their history and recent statements. That quote is fine if you know nothing about the person or institution you are making attributions to, but we know enough about Ubisoft to press X to doubt that they don't know exactly what they're doing when they make games unplayable without online controlled by them.