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
Live service and single player is not incompatible... Unfortunately...
Look at Hitman (2016 and forward), all require an online connection to play, and release new stuff monthly.
Many of Ubisofts games also require an online connection despite being fully single player, and you can even buy currency for the in-game single player shop with real money... What used to be a cheat code is now a microtransaction.
Say no to buying online games. Exceptions are f2p with it being free anyways. But, sucks to "buy" a game charging full retail and have it become not only unplayable but removed.
Most ironic thing about this is apparently game can still be downloaded for people who bought it through steam. So Ubisoft consumers are getting shafted hard.
I kinda like how the Unreal Tournament 2004 situation resolved itself:
Epic pulled the game from sale on online stores, but you still keep it in your library.
After almost 20 years of continous operation, Epic shut down the master server last year, this should be a benchmark of a good deal when buying a multiplayer game, now shutting down the master servers didn't mean online play stopped working, no, even before the shut off date, fans had a new fan made master server up and running and a quick config change in the ut2004.ini file is all that is required to get the experience back to how it worked on release.
Or just having an offline mode with every game that can be single player. I’m tired of every new game needing to be “always online” as thinly veiled DRM when that just means the game will stop working when the servers shut down
AC black flag was the last Ubisoft game I bought. After that I just lost interest in the company. Everything was yearly release garbage and cash grabs. I'm sorry but I don't feel bad for people that support them or Activision. Bethesda is also on the line. Buy indie games and support small companies.