Comment by caranti

Some good responses here already. One angle that's not been mentioned yet is informed consent at the time of purchase.

When "buying" not "renting" there is presently no information for the consumer to make an informed choice about what they are purchasing when it comes to a live service game because no end-of-service date is available at the time of making the purchasing decision.

This is in large part why the end of The Crew was problematic for many people.

Had the service end of life been advertised at the point of purchase the consumer could have knowingly "purchased" a time-limited product, or not, but the decision would have been informed.

All this stuff about end-of-life plans, releasing self-hosted servers, patching out online-only stuff and leaving behind an offline-only game, etc, is great, but it's only one of the possible remedies that SKG have been discussing for the last couple of years.

Another perfectly feasible one is not to dress up a time-limited entitlement to participate in a live service as the same thing as an "own forever" product at the point of purchase.