You may want to know that Ubisoft’s Rocksmith® 2014 Edition will be de-listed from Steam and other online stores after October 23rd, 2023 which is one week from this post date. This is a game that makes learning to play the guitar like Guitar Hero/Rockband, which can score you or let you slowly practice a part with scrolling fret indicators.
Now, it’s not on sale or anything (hasn’t been for a couple years), there might be W11 issues (I’m using Win 10 and Linux computers), and you’ll need a real guitar and either a mic or special USB cable to properly play the game. However, after this date you won’t be able to purchase this game anymore unless you buy from a key-seller or a retail CD copy.
Of course, Ubisoft is going to replace this 40 CAD game with a subscription service model called Rocksmith+ which is 20 CAD per month and not available on Steam. On the other hand, RS2014 works without the need of a Uplay account and can be played offline (Just press Esc twice at the signin screen).
Now there are 1555 DLCs available but they will eventually be delisted as well at some point in the future but you won’t be able to get them without the base game. The only DLC you will “need” is the Cherub Rock DLC because of…
Custom DLC is a community created mod that lets you play user-created and converted maps. By default it uses the DLC ID of Cherub Rock which is why you need it, but this is configurable if you really don’t want to spend 4 CAD. There are tens of thousands of Custom DLC songs available online so you will be hard pressed to run out of new ones to try.
And that's what makes this bad. A game that's perfectly playable and even has a community is taken away by greedy Ubisoft. This should be illegal.
Sailing the seven seas for RS2014 is morally acceptable in this case.
No, it's morally obligatory.
On the one hand, yes, this is both stupid and really dickish behaviour from Ubisoft. On the other hand...
No. Full stop. no. No one should be compelled to continue selling something they don't want to sell anymore. If it has social value, it should be reproduced and superseded by something owned by society as a whole. The seller shouldn't, under any circumstances, have the right to disable the things you bought outright from them, but that's about it.
We have channels we can use to access things that are no longer supported or sold by the developer (and selling something implies -- and should imply -- support from the developers). It's absolutely messed up that those channels are themselves illegal, but believing that you should be able to compel someone else to do what you want, against their will, just because you want them to do it is just an authoritarian hissy fit.
They shouldn't be required to keep selling it, but they should be required to strip it of any DRM when they do stop selling it.
That way everyone wins. They can get out of the market at minimal effort and players can still enjoy their games.
If it's any consolation, Ubisoft removed Denuvo sometime in the last couple years, and the UPlay sign in screen is annoying but can be bypassed fairly simply.
I mean...they're removing it from sale because they have a more egregious business model to sell you instead that no one wants. And that last qualifier you added about alternative channels being illegal is the problem, because we have no measures to preserve things like this.
Selling or licensing IP should be a hard requirement for maintaining ownership of it. That doesn't require compelling anyone to do anything; it's merely withdrawing privilege of IP ownership from someone not using it for its intended purpose, which is, to quote the US Constitution, “[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”