This statement was made by Ubisoft's director of subscriptions, Phillipe Tremblay, who recently spoke to Gamesindustry.biz about the digital future and Ubisoft Plus specifically. Tremblay states that people eventually "got comfortable" with not owning their CD or DVD collections, and that a similar shift in attitude "needs to happen" in gamers.
I'm playing an Ubisoft game right now; if a game is cheap enough on Steam I don't care who the publisher is. So I got Immortals Fenyx Rising in exchange for dirt.
It bears all the signs of a great creative team getting fucked over by exactly the sort of idiot who runs his mouth like that guy. There's even a demo level, explicitly called such in the game, for the now-cancelled sequel, how sad is that? The control scheme isn't completely ironed out and has some screwy behaviour in niche situations. There's a huge wait as you load the game while it checks the server for updates which will never come, duration of nearly a minute and sometimes longer, the sort of thing that a responsible company would remove when updates are no longer forthcoming (surely it's at most a few lines of code, and circumventable by one); and I haven't finished the game yet but it seems right now that the main story-giving NPC who hangs out at your base is just selling fuckin macrotransaction cosmetics. Tacky, and you can taste the dev team's resentment in being forced to include it.