It’s true. Pragmatically speaking if you don’t have access to the server software you can’t play it if the servers go down, and besides reverse engineering or the goodwill of the developers I’m not aware of any games with online components that continue to be playable after their servers are taken down.
The way I see it, that number is a baseline figure for what their services would be offered for in exchange. If someone came up to me and said “here, I’ll give you $53 and in exchange you’ll let me surveil you for a year” I’d say no, but maybe someone else would’ve said yes. Then, as an experiment, maybe we can let the market take it from there, now that there’s a price and some form of discovery mechanism.