This has been happening with Video Games for a while. There is a major initiative called "Stop Killing Games" which was triggered when Ubisoft bricked "The Crew" when servers were shutdown.
This is much worse. The Crew was always framed as an 'always online' game, even if that was technically a farce. This would be more like if Bethesda rolled out an update to cripple Skyrim after releasing a new Elder Scrolls game to lackluster sales.