Don't buy Ubisoft games, clearly. Games which require servers to work at all (vs. just the mulitplayer components working) are also a big no. This is likely a good thing: it will educate gamers about unnecessary DRM.
Looking at you Microsoft Office, Quickbooks, and every Adobe product.
If you have disk space to spare, I would recommend downloading GOG’s offline installers as a backup. The risk of the service disappearing or games you’ve bought being removed seems pretty low, but DRM‐free offline installers are just as good as the classic “physical copy,” provided you actually saved them!
Better even as the classic physical copies often had DRM to prevent you from making backups. Not that there weren't workarounds but still, being able to just back them up like any other file is better in my book.
Unfortunately the "if you have disk space" part is not always irrelevant. Would be nicer if we could share that backup space by chunking up the installers into blocks and then advertise via a distributed table of hashes who has which blocks available. Ideally we'd also have a protocol to let these blocks of bits flow from those that have them to those that need them.
Ubisoft appears to be largely propped up by generous tax credit in French speaking parts of the world and I don't think its going to last.
Question is who stands to buy them out? Their market cap is way overvalued.
I miss the old days where you had to figure stuff out. Literally remember spending days in FF7 talking to everyone until it triggered an event. Frustrating but rewarding.
Situations like this will educate nobody about anything though. Many irate forum posts will be written, and the course of the world, and these people's lives will change about 0 percent. If gamers, as a group, would be able to learn anything, there wouldn't be hype for early access titles, or they wouldn't pre-order, but I'm not seeing either.
The actual best thing to happen to these franchises, in my view, is pirates freeing them from their corporate shackles that is DRM. This helps them to be actually relevant and to give people good experiences consistently - although, you could argue that this also helps them not sink into their well deserved irrelevance, so in the end piracy is helping to sell the original like in the case of Windows or Photoshop, or how people knowing the music drives the sale of concert tickets. Still, at least pirated copies can be used by the people who are genuinely missing the experience after the DRM servers inevitable shut down.