What's The Point Of Physical Discs If Games Are Always-Online Anyway?

Summary

• Ubisoft's The Crew has been delisted and will have its servers shut off in April 2024, making it completely unplayable forever.
• More games are becoming always-online, mainly for DRM purposes, but this can leave players without access if servers go down or if they have internet outages.
• Buying physical games won't protect you from obsolescence if games are dependent on servers, as studios may choose to shut down support for the game.

Ubisoft’s The Crew has been out for less than a decade, and it’s already become obsolete. The game has been delisted without warning, and Ubisoft has announced that its servers will shut off in April 2024. It’s an always-online game, which means it will become completely unplayable. Forever. There’s no plan to transition the game into an offline experience despite there already being plenty of offline content, leaving players in the lurch. It’s another reminder that you can own a game, digitally or physically, and that still doesn’t mean you’ll have it forever.

It’s a punch in the gut to media preservationists, but we’ve always known that this was a possibility. More and more games are being made always-online whether or not it actually makes gameplay better, which is mainly a way for companies to control piracy through DRM, or digital rights management.

DRM doesn’t always actually stop piracy, and it locks players out of the game if they suffer an Internet outage or the servers go down. It also means servers getting shut down will kill the game.

Many big studios are guilty of using always-online DRM, which means plenty of popular games are at risk of meeting the same fate as The Crew. Hitman is always-online, which has personally caused me plenty of grief when servers crash since I’ve been playing quite a lot of it. Gran Turismo 7 is as well, as are several Call of Duty games, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, the 2016 Doom reboot, Payday 3, both sequels to The Crew… there are so many.

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Everything is online now. A lot of times, when you buy the ‘physical’ edition of a game, you’re really just buying a key. You won’t find the game on those discs, they just trigger the download of a digital file over the internet. Don’t have internet, or live in a rural area with subpar coverage? Tough luck! And when you buy digital, you’re essentially buying a license to a game. If you lose access to your account for whatever reason, all those licences are gone. Getting your account hacked is a lot more likely than, say, your house burning down, or somebody breaking into your home and stealing all your physical games.

But buying physical games won’t do you any good if games are increasingly always-online and dependent on servers. A game you paid money for could become completely obsolete, and the studio could tell you, in more words, “Sucks for you!” Ubisoft’s reason was, specifically, “it has become a necessity due to upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints”. It doesn’t work for Ubisoft to provide support for a game anymore, so it’s shutting it down. You’ve got sequels to migrate to, anyway.

And fine, it’s not always realistic for us to expect studios to support games in perpetuity. But always-online DRM can be patched out, and that’s what should have been done for The Crew to avoid leaving long-term players in the lurch. Instead, a game completely ceases to exist in any playable form, and we simply have to bite our tongues and accept it.

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