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.
They did that in the LOTR Journeys in Middle-Earth game and in the new editions of Descent. The scenarios, spawns and enemy movement are all managed by the app, which is fine, but they don't have an alternative way to play without it, which is crappy. But I'm sure that if they stop support someone will reverse engineer it and make a ruleset to admin these things.