The only thing that turned Ubisoft around was a combination of the vocal group who shouted at them with every game and the loss of sales that it caused.
Being vocal about how wrong this is, how it hurts legitimate customers and taking simple action against it is the only way that you can potentially turn it around.
^ Agree 100%. For many, the issue isn't specifically about "Order of War", it's about the potentially significantly shorter lifespan of digitally distributed games in the future for purely artificial reasons, the general trend / direction things are heading in of aggressively shoehorning gamers into a tightly-controlled overly-centralised narrow distribution channel, a revocation policy that's a lot more open-ended than is healthy, and the dangers of literally losing games in the long run on a timescale out of all proportion to other entertainment media due to blind reliance of one single distribution company being around forever...
Steam may not be "guilty" of having to follow Square Enix's demands, but the message sent here is essentially "
Any game you buy through Steam is disposable with a potential open-ended "killswitch" attached. If it still works 4 years later, that's a 'rental privilege' from your developer Serf to you peasants, not a perfectly normal consumer right to use what you've paid for like 10 years ago or in every other form of alternative entertainment". Thank God for GOG.com, CD's, DVD's & Blu-Ray's because I sure as hell wouldn't accept all my other entertainment purchases (books, music, films, etc) being funnelled through one single company which required my 'permission' to use for decades to come...
The game in question here was an "already broken" MMO sure, but another publisher might well decide to delete another game via Steam for entirely different reasons (eg, involuntary political censorship, IP changes after developer bankruptcy, etc). With Steam now taking the first step in retroactively wiping games from collections in practise, everything ultimately relies on the "goodness of developers hearts" to support games authentications beyond 3 years (OOWC was only released in 2010), which as we all know attitudes vary radically from "
games written by gamers for gamers" for some, to "
you are filthy peasants underneath our shareholders feet" for certain others...
It's been fascinating reading other threads here over the past few days, like
this one and
this one where a surprising number of people are still playing 5-20 year old games which work just fine on modern hardware with or without minor tweaks. In contrast, OOWC was barely 3.5 years old before it was wiped. Something to think about for the long run if developers start getting into the trend of dictating that games "should" start having arbitrary finite lifespans of only a few years due to the cost of maintaining DRM, etc...