Apologies for the OT below:
FWIW, this type of thing very strongly irks me partly because I have a fair bit of software (mostly for music and sound creation, much of it supposedly intended for professional studio / composer usage) that is unusable for this reason.
The companies either don't exist anymore, and thus their activation or other servers are gone, or they've changed hands and don't accept that any customers from the previous owners have valid software--they insist they have to buy the newest version to get any "help" (which includes activations to be able to reinstall their existing software even on the very same machine it's always been on).
Some of the companies still exist under the same owners, but refuse to activate older software anymore, and won't even offer a discount on a newer version (which often won't even import old projects or settings, or in many cases even perform vital functions the old version did), so it's useless to "upgrade" in order to use it with existing projects that used the old one. (and the companies simply cannot understand what the problem is...or even that there *is* a problem!)
Some of the software requires internet access the whole time it's running, every time, becuase it randomly "phones home" and has to ask if it's ok to be running. So...if the network goes down, or the server is down (or gone), or the company simply decides they no longer accept "pings" from some version or whatever, the customer is out of luck.
(in theory it's piracy prevention, but in reality the pirated software is all hacked to take that out, so pirates can steal anything they want and use it without issue, while all the honest actual paying customers get screwed over. AFAICR, not a single company I have ever worked with or purchased from ever even sort-of kept their promise of releasing their "codes" when they went under, though few of the dozens ever made that promise).
Lots of variations on those, and other issues, but they all come down to "you're screwed" because you can't use it if they don't decide you can (or aren't there to do the deciding).
This kind of problem is even worse when it happens for hardware that runs your transportation (like these controllers).