Is this even legal everywhere? Can they just pull the game people had paid for, without providing a refund in countries with consumer protection laws?
[0] ...the rights to access and/or use any Content and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as "Subscriptions."
... The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services.
The question is rather which of the EU customers will/can afford to sue Steam. My guess is they'll offer a refund for those games before it comes to a law suit.
In any cause, the usual targets seem to be games with annual releases. Apparently, people love buying the same games over and over. While it sucks, this is clearly not on the same level as Blizzard shutting down StarCraft battle-net servers. Lots of people would be rightfully furious.
In my case, the last Ubi game I purches, and played, was released back in 2003. Hopefully that clears my stance on this particular company
It's bringing an inherent disadvantage of closed multi-player games to single player games.
What's the excuse for forcibly shutting down the single player experience though?
1. Service level agreement for n years explicitly stated at release?
2. Release a binary containing the bare necessites of the title's backend services (stripped of any analytics or proprietary stuff)?
3. Something else?
Whats frustrating is that studios and publishers (should) have an idea of what the lifetime cost for each player is, so they can price the game appropriately. I wish it were industry best practice for large studios to be transparent at release and state "we can support this game for a minimum of 10 years, if it's a hit, longer".
Server-side code might have proprietary components or code reused for other games, or a whole lot of complications which are difficult to extricate from a "free" release, and the company might just not want the bother. Releasing something always comes with expectations, just look at how much grief authors of free and open source code sometimes get from entitled users!
But yeah, I would love for game companies to release their servers once the commercial shelf life of a game has ended.
I think it's unrealistic to always expect this, though.
2. Service level agreement for n years explicitly stated at release? -> Actually Yes, If we are buying subscriptions I would like to see the terms of that subscription.
They already demand for example that bans for cheating only affect the multiplayer part of the game.
As I said above, I stopped dealing with this company a long, long time ago.
Do you mean in the sense of "people are still playing this game instead of buying my new game?". Probably. I would guess this is probably false though -- that people keep buying games for companies they perceive as consumer-friendly.
Or do you mean they lose money by providing customer support? They could just add a warning notice the game is no longer supported, and that you buy it (or play it) at your own risk.
It wouldn't be the first time companies make short-sighted decisions, though.