I had a service outage from my ISP the other day, so I figured I'd play some offline AC:Odyssey. Imagine my surprise when it refused to launch (from the disc, no less) without a connection.
I think they'll roll it out to just France.
It's also frustrating when the legal system works so slow that competitors like Epic, Origin, et al. don't have to abide by this ruling yet.
One article I read said France is fighting the issue in a way under EU laws that the rest of the EU should be able to adopt the judgment quickly thereafter, though it may take a few more court cases to do it, as it partly depends on whether Valve appeals the case enough. (The semi-ironic risk versus reward of the appeals process pushing it closer to EU courts, versus overturning France's decision here.)
I'm still somewhat upset that the GDPR writers knew digital asset rights would be the "next fight" after a lot of the privacy concerns were addressed but explicitly kicked the can on it (a brief like half paragraph about how they considered it but ignored it). This fight maybe increases the likelihood we could see some future GDPR-like bill for digital assets rights.
Such an EU-wide measure might be real hope that, like the GDPR, it would apply quickly to other competitors and generally worldwide since the EU market is big enough (and covers its citizens even when residing in non-EU nation states) that it would be too much work to run two systems.
(Aside: my personal fascination is how long it may take us to start fighting over digital asset inheritance laws, given that most terms of service agreements imply that services do not survive their owner.)
