Ubisoft is stripping people's licences for The Crew weeks after its shutdown, nearly squandering hopes of fan servers and acting as a stark reminder of how volatile digital ownership is
Maybe raise a stink with your attorney general and/or representative, too. The whole idea that a company can sell licenses for something and then arbitrarily decide they don't want to do it anymore and revoke all the licenses doesn't sound legal. And if it is, it doesn't sound like it should be.
Afaik nobody has cracked it as it's always-online, though I'd be happily incorrect about this if one can slide me some sauce. I'm one of the affected players in the shutdown (still play occasionally) so the ability to continue playing this game would be very nice.
How the digital ownership normalized the fact that any service, game can disappear easily. The full digital future empowered the corporations, and that issue is here clearly shown by Ubisoft.
When Nintendo eshop closed, I lost all my purchases. I tried contacting Nintendo to see if they could transfer my purchases to my switch account, but contacting Nintendo is like trying to contact god, you're gonna get nowhere
Thanks UbiSoft for rubbing it in my face with this message, "You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the Store to pursue your adventures?"
Not the same thing at all. When the Crew is lost, a unique game and its world are lost with it. That's like saying if you want to play something like Metal Gear Solid you can go play Hitman. They're broadly the same genre, but a lot of unique art and experience is lost by just giving up and letting it go the easy way.
That should be "ownership" as actual ownership implies having control over a thing and no one who "purchased" this seems to have much control. Breaking the DRM and creating a self hosted sever is taking ownership of it. Don't pretend CD keys were physical ownership either unless the key was entirely validated offline which admittedly older key schemes were.
It's a shame, but people are asking for it when they buy, and therefore support, these kind of games. If people simply refused to buy always-online games, we wouldn't be in this mess.