EA did this thing a while back where they saw people were still playing Bad Company 2 on PC on community servers. They updated the game to require a login to EA's server on boot, then took those servers down. Always online is cancer.
They finally killed off BC2? So I can finally give up on the futile effort of reinstalling the game every year, in hopes that maybe I'll find a populated server this time around?
I miss that game so much. Rush was so much fun. The maps were designed perfectly for that game mode, unlike future BF titles where it's a tacked on feature. It was so good, that I found out the hard way that I actually don't like Battlefield games, after wasting money on BF3, 4, and Hardline, and hating all of them. I just want more Bad Company games.
It was dead last time I tried playing (because of the login thing). Unless someone made a community patch to bypass the login prompt, I guess.
You're pretty much in the same situation I'm in. BFBC2 was the last Battlefield game I liked, and it was because Rush was so much fucking fun in that. I hate how much the newer ones kind of mostly focus on Conquest, personally.
That's what every game company has said about every game for decades though! A game disc which installs and plays the game was legally still some nebulous "this provides a licence to play the game which can be revoked at any time", it's only now that the companies actually have the power to revoke them at any time.
👨🚀🔫👨🚀Always has been. You never owned the software. Even when games were on cd or cartridge. The only thing that is your legal possession is the physical CD or cartridge and the license that came with it.
Always has been a blatant motherfucking lie, you mean.
Saying you don't own a game you bought is exactly as batshit insane as saying you don't own a paper book you bought. We wouldn't put up with this shit for that, so we shouldn't put up with it for games either!
Stop letting the copyright cartel steal our property rights and drive us into serfdom.
For the same reason that YouTube music refuses to play offline content stored on your phone until there's a live internet connection - particularly helpful when you're outside of coverage.
That reason is that you are the product and playing without being tracked doesn't make any money.
No, it's not the same; not even slightly! Youtube Music is a monthly subscription, whereas Ubisoft presents the transaction as a sale. Ubisoft has no right to gatekeep your property away from you.
Unless something has recently changed, I was unable to play music that was downloaded inside YouTube music but refused to play if there was no internet access.
Live service and always online are two entirely different things, and the former isn't inherently malicious, unlike the latter.
I'd, for example, consider all Paradox grand strategy games as live service with major updates dropping once or twice a year (followed by like twenty bugfix patches cause they fuck up every time, but that's besides the point). Sure, every major update comes with a new dlc that isn't exactly cheap, but you also get a lot of free content with each release. All their major titles are entirely different games now than they were at the 1.0 release.
What ubisoft does is just a tacked on battle pass that gets a few worthless items/skins so they can call it live service and have a justification for their always online verification model. That's purely an anti piracy measure that fucks legitimate players more than pirates.
In the Paradox case, nothing is live, and they aren't pretending it's a service. They just put goods out at a rapid clip that you choose to buy or not. That's why live service games are always online. If Paradox counts, then so do board games, and that's absurd.
Almost as annoying is DS1, 3 and Elden Ring booting you to the main menu just cuz you got disconnected. But at least they can still be played, it's just annoying to be pulled out of the game for that when it's mostly just for bloodstains, messages and being invaded.