Warning, this game and its DLCs are protected by Uplay\Ubisoft connect, and Ubisoft may remove your license to run this game and DLC at any time as it happened with The Crew! Do not buy any game and DLC tied to Ubisoft connect launcher\drm and refund every Ubisoft game and DLC you got that has this launcher\drm until they took away your game and DLC from you and shut down servers!

Now the Full story:
You bought game on Steam, but because it relies on Ubisoft Connect (Uplay) third party DRM and Launcher - Ubisoft has full control over game on their side, and they not just pulled the server plug without releasing offline patch or releasing server software binary and server and game sources to let users continue to run the game and maintain it unofficially, they also removed license to run The Crew via Uplay\Ubi (dis)connect without removing DRM from game, which is 100% illegal and literally a thievery, and it also goes against Steam rules.

This leads to next conclusion - Valve should not allow any company to push third party DRM and Launchers on steam, and all the DRM and Launch must be 100% steam controlled with Valves ability to release a steam wide patch that will allow to play all steam games forever offline if Steam servers will ever goes down and even online with unofficial servers.

Any existing game with third party online DRM and Launcher must be forced by Valve to get patched out of these launchers and DRMs and until its done entire catalogue of games from such publishers that has it should be temporary blocked from sales until they will meet this needed technical requirment with all previously released games.

Third party publishers may keep their launchers\server side integration only via DLL, but not the stand alone exe launchers (same way as old GFWL and current Xbox integration did it long time ago) which should be optional and should provide online features such as achievements, and stats and MP, that mirrors Steam features but not replaces them, but this should not serve as DRM that prevents launching game on Steam and that can controls licenses besides Steam own license control implementation.

Additionally Valve must force all new and old games to use Steam's own cloud saves feature for every game to prevent cases like The Crew where all the progress was stored server-side and we lost even our progress when they shut down servers, as no local copy or Steam cloud copy of save exist.

If third party launchers provide cloud saves this feature - they may remain and may act as secondary copy in case someone would want to launch this game outside of steam directly from third party launchers (that may allow to launch their non steam versions but should be removed from Steam version), and it should be implemented via online services shared DLL, not the separate exe launchers.

Also every game with online services that is sold on steam, new or old should be patched to provide steam online services as alternative to publisher's own servers for all the online features, and additionally all the dedicated and master servers binaries and sources must be provided with every online game old and new they must be patched out to get option which allows to change master servers and to connect directly to ips of servers dedicated or p2p.

This must be done with all the old games and must be forced to new games. This should give steam users warranty that whenever official servers will be shut done, all online features will remain working with Steam or custom user servers as backup to which users should be able to switch easily with in-game options (ot at least inside some ini or cfg file or CMD argument).

We should demand Valve to enforce this policy and to ban publishers and developers who refuse to update their games according to this "game preservation policy". If Valve will deny this request we should force Valve to eforce this policy to third parties with help of courts and goverments of our countries and all sorts of customer protection services!

Besides this - Ubisoft should be the 1st company to get banned by Valve from selling games on Steam until all the old and new games will be patched to remove Uplay launcher\drm and allow 100% offline and Steam only launch of every game, and until Ubi will restore all online features of all released games with release of user operatable backup servers which software should be provided with game distribution, and until games updated to have option that would allow to change to custom backup master servers adress and also to connect directly to dedicated servers and p2p servers of other cliens of games to play online with them.

Lan, direct ip, change of master servers adresses, release of dedicated servers and presence of alternate p2p connection without any third party servers all must be 100% forced technical requirement for any game with any online feature, ever released on steam.

And we should never trust Ubisoft again and should stop buying any Uplay\Ubisoft connect protected games until this protection will removed from every game, and we should demand refund for every Ubisoft game that uses Uplay or that has Ubi online features disabled, because part of features we paid for are gone and because Uplay proved to be unreliable service that may take away any of your games even if you own them on Steam, so to prevent another act of thievery from Ubisoft we must refund every game that is tied to their servers and Valve must allow this after what Ubi did to The Crew and many other games, like Splinter Cell Black list which is now 1\3 of game it was after coop and versus servers was shut down, making more thant half of game broken and unaccessible!

One more thing we should all do - we should not trust any other publisher which pushes their own launchers and drm, including DENUVO with its online activation, and any of games that has third party launchers, their own DRMS and Denuvo should also be boycotted or refunded if such games was already purchased. And we must demand Valve to enforce removal of those third party launchers and DRMs and online only dependency from all existing games on Steam!

We must also demand our goverments to make a law that forces all of this and restricts companies to use online DRMs and to shut down any servers without proving offline drm free patches and providing server side software and option to change adress to make it possible for user continue to run servers unofficially and also without providing entire source codes of discontinued\unsupported\shut down games and their server side software.

There must a law that forces release of full (even if it includes commercial middleware, it should remain intact in sources and law should be above its licenses, but license may restrict commercial use of such sources, so you can only modificate and release such source in non profitable attempt to keep discontinued game or software operational and up to date) source code and source assets package of any game and software when its getting discontinued and unsupported and its servers getting shut down, so that users can keep them functional and operational unofficially. Also law must force release of source in 2-4 years since initial sales, when sales become unsignificant, even when official support not yet finished, to let users fix games and maintain them even if publisher did not officially discontinued game. Law should also invalidate time limited licenses for music and other third party insertions and make them lasting for infinity as integral part of original game, expired licenses should not prevent games from being sold, and should prevent them from being patched for sake of removal of expired content, this should not allowed!

All of this needs to be forced by laws for sake of game preservation!!!!!!!

the launcher is absolute garbo. can't even play the game.

I will leave the cat here, so that everybody who passes by can pet it and give it a thumbs up and awards
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