Has the game industry crossed the Rubicon regarding always online? Will players accept this?

Game companies have been trying to push "always online" for their games for awhile now. They see it as advantageous for a number of reasons, from data harvesting to piracy protection to anti-cheat. But I think there's another, more insidious, reason, which is that it means that games are starting to come with unlisted expiration dates. As companies become more and more reliant on rehashing the same games over and over they also become more resistant to just selling us a game and letting us keep it forever. Always online is a way to prevent this. It doesn't matter if you bought Babylon's Fall on disc or digitally, that game will be completely unplayable soon. The same seems to be true of more and more games coming out over the past few years and into the future.

Call of Duty has gone always online, even for single player. Blood Bowl 3? Always online. Gran Turismo 7. Outriders. Redfall. Suicide Squad. These are all games with significant single player components that people might be more likely to play single player and that will some day shut the servers off. In the case of Call of Duty it may be a decade from now. In the case of something like Outriders it may be a couple of years, but they are going away, permanently, at some point (possibly when the publisher decides to remake/remaster them.)

This is, of course, terrible for consumers, and it does come with some backlash, but game companies keep pushing this down our throats with the hopes that eventually we'll just accept it, like we've accepted so many other anti-consumer moves. All the reasons they give for it are absolute garbage (We know you don't need to be always online just to offer multiplayer, since games have been doing it regularly since the 7th gen, and even the 6th) but they have their (greedy) reasons.

So is there any chance this trend will reverse itself or are we just stuck with it? As someone who likes to play older games and sometimes buys games that I end up playing many years later this has definitely influenced my purchasing. I probably would have bought Destiny 2 at some point if the game didn't have huge chunks literally removed because of its structure. I probably would have bought a cheap copy of Metal Gear Survive just to check it out too. And Outriders plus expansion. But you don't really buy these games. You just rent them for an undetermined period. I have played a lot of games with missing functionality because servers are down, often pretty soon after the game's release, but when it doesn't cripple the game (like inFamous losing its user missions or Mad Max losing its online materials stuff) I generally don't mind so much. However it seems that more and more games are being designed this way just so the publisher can pull the plug on them at some later date (presumably to either resell them or to force you to move on to other games) and I absolutely hate it.

I honestly don't mind the always online stuff except for when you're in the middle of a mission and their servers fuck up and you get booted. Like yesterday when I was playing the the final mission for the Witch Queen DLC for Destiny 2 that was free to play over the weekend. Thank god Bungie implemented a proper checkpoint system. Starting out from scratch because of a server issue would be maddening. Otherwise, its never effected me.

The industry is basically united behind it, so there's nothing we can do about it right now.

I could see a future where the emulation community has found a way to fake-out the system by simulating server checks through some kind of offline process or software or app or whatever. I don't know if anyone has put that into practice or if it's even possible right now. But I can't think it'll be impossible forever.

Yeah, I don't like online DRM for single-player mode-focused games as they tend to make it feel more like MMO games plus I can tell not everyone has a good internet connection or either they don't like playing online multiplayer mode. To me, instead of having online DRM, they better have a save file detector to scan if it's hacked, then that's the only way to ban them from playing online for good.

Personally, living in an area where internet connectivity is spotty and also being someone who actively despises playing online—with friends or strangers—and only goes online on my consoles to browse the shops, I can say without hyperbole that if everything went online-only I would stop buying new games and consoles fully. Gaming is just a hobby for me and is getting harder to find time for the older I get and the more my career moves in the direction I'd like it to, so while I would LIKE to game forever, if the industry gets to a point where I can't even play a single-player game because the servers are down or my connection is in the shitter, I'm out. I'm also someone who buys games knowing I won't get to them for years, due to life stuff. So if I have to worry about servers going offline turning single-player games into bricks... yeah, it's a non-starter for me. I'll just slowly creep through my massive backlog and then call it a day.

I don't really mind always online for live service games. I do mind trying to make games that shouldn't be live service games into ones. I get that companies need to find ways to milk consumers due to rising costs, but the way all AAA games seem to be full of real money shops even if they're just singleplayer games makes me just skip them altogether. Always online requirements just seem to be a symptom of that.

Since Blood Bowl 3 was mentioned, fuck developers like Cyanide. This is the fourth fantasy rugby game that they've been dishonest about. But even then, this takes a whole new level of lying: revealing only after the launch that basic features, such as rules updates that were promised for launch, are only coming in updates at the end of the year is bullshit. I have a friend that preordered the game and was royally fucked since it's kind of an unplayable mess. The fact that the game doesn't have the ability to reconnect after possible disconnections and that feature is also coming later is just icing on a shit cake.

We're stuck with it, for indie devs every sale matters so there's still value in making your game as pro-user as possible, DRM free, playable offline, optimised, starting a community around you is easier if you're nice. AAA gets to stand on its yacht and say "if you want to come on board here are the terms", the drinks are expensive and they won't even let you take a napkin home with you, but plenty of people will still get on.

Increasingly i don't want to, but the few times i do it hurts knowing i won't be able to play these games in the future, there's plenty of people who don't care about that but i replay all my favourites and still dig up old games i haven't played yet. For the most part i guess the "best" games will be around for a long time, maybe forever, but there's going to be so many high profile online only games in the future getting turned off, hell Epic removed the Unreal games from sale and those are playable offline so i guess nothing is sacred, but at least people can keep those games available to some degree... ehem...

I really like For Honor, i even like the story mode for it, but given Ubisoft's tendency to abandon old games and their spiraling performance these days i fully expect them to shut it down in the future, and if i can't at least play the story mode or face bots offline that's going to be really sad. I totally understand servers need to be shut down, but at the very least the offline components of games shouldn't become unplayable, and at most the tools should be available for users to make online games playable again to some degree, but publishers really aren't interested in making friendly gestures unless they're forced to.

I skipped Gran Turismo Sport assuming i would be jumping into the new full game of Gan Turismo 7 when that was finally out. All ready to pay the $70 price at launch because i usually play it often enough, and they do free updates, that i know i was going to get my moneys worth. But the always online with no word on if they will ever remove it at its end of life was reason enough not to purchase it until its cheap enough im willing to toss the money i spend on it away forever. So they went from $70 from me, to maybe $10 from me when it on sale years down the road. And even then i may just skip it and move on to another driving game, potentially losing my sales forever.

I know they are trying to make Gran Turismo this very serious racing game where you can eventually learn enough to be a real race car driver, and they want to make sure people are not hacking saves and such. But im just a duder who wants to drive some cars around and have some fun in a fairly accurate car driving sim. So what if someone has a car they don't deem them worthy of because they didn't grind for hours to earn the fake money to buy it. Or they glitched through the track in order to qualify to earn the prize car. Lock me out of the leaderboards and online if you want, not the $70 game if i have been playing my game offline and you cant 100% trust my data.

Seems super excessive in order to maintain the integrity of your online leaderboards, and more just a way to try and make people to spend real money for there fake money to buy fake cars already in the game they purchased.

@lego_my_eggo: I think you are giving them too much credit. I don't actually think that it's about worrying about people hacking their saves for online races. There are ways to check that already. It's about microtransactions. See it's not that they're concerned about the integrity of the game, it's about making sure that you have to pay real money to skip parts of the grind.

And I think it's also about their ability to sunset the game whenever they want. GT 8 comes out and it's not as popular because it lacks certain features? No problem. Just turn GT 7 off and people have to move over. And all those microtransactions they spent money on but can no longer use? They can buy them all over again! It's a gaming utopia!

This has never really been that big of an issue to me, especially since the pandemic started, but I can see why some people would find it off-putting!

With Outriders, Redfall and Suicide Squad I get the impression these games in the developers eyes are co-op first titles and the always online aspect is for seemless drop in/out co-op, I'm not really seeing a wider trend.

Forced online really is the one stain on the otherwise fantastic new Hitman trilogy. They released Hitman 1 (reboot) on GOG, but the users thankfully raised such a stink about the game not really being DRM-free if it requires a constant connection to an IO server that could go down at any point, that they pulled it from the store completely. It really is alarming though how they would rather not sell the game than than simply remove the always-on requirement.

And the point is that there is absolutely no benefit for the player to do this. The best reasoning they have come up with seems to be that you can compare your high scores with your friends, as if they can't upload my score the next time I am online, or that I can't simply call my friend to ask them what their score is if I'm really that interested.

I have a bad connection. It cuts out several times a day, which is usually not a problem when watching video of browsing the net, but when playing a game it immediately breaks my game and threatens to lose all my progression. For absolutely no reason. And I live near the center of a major European metropolitan city. My apartment building is just old and this is the best connection available. That's not going to change until they tear this building down and built a new one, which could be 50 years from now. The problem with people having bad connections isn't going away. Sure, I could get 5G but in my limited testing it is even more unreliable than my current connection.

As someone that has spent the last couple generations on PC gaming, I am used to the "always online", DRM policy.

Half of the launchers don't have an offline mode regardless of the game, and the other half has a spotty one, at best. It doesn't matter if its a co-op 3rd person shooter or a 100+ hours JRPG, many games will kick you back to the main menu if they loose connection with some server in the cloud.

I used to loathe it - I've long been in the minority of the gaming community living in the Arctic where my internet was slow, heavily metered and ridiculously expensive. Chewing up my family's small bandwidth cap just to play some game was never worth it.

Since the pandemic forced a lot of infrastructure changes (or atleast policy updates) internet in my area is now faster, "cheaper" and finally, FINALLY has done away with disgusting bandwidth caps.

So - in light of this I have less of an issue with it other then I think its a BS move to control the consumer; but at the end of the day if its a good game, its a good game. I'll never have time to go back and replay them anyway and the games that I ~would~ want to go back and play havent occurred in the last few generations anyway.

Similarly I was pro-disc as well until recently. Now that I can download and delete games at a whim I cant be bothered to swap discs and have all this needless clutter in my house.

@junkerman said:

I don't want to single the poster out as it's up to everybody to decide how the feel about this issue, but, this thought process is exactly why always on has become a problem. A lot of people think this way - the game is good, I'll take the hit to my consumer/privacy rights.

As long as people are still willing to buy games even it's always online and/or intrusive DRM, it'll keep on happening. "Regularization of the norm" -- if you keep crowding in on consumer rights, then people stop realizing what they've lost. The real tragedy will be when things like the first-sale doctrine and such get eroded away for remaining physical goods, because people are just used to giving all control to whoever sold them the product, even though they keep getting burned over and over again.

Outside of legal rights, there's just the plain old long term unsustainability of the system. Hell, I'm waiting for the day when some manufacturer decides their IoT Fridges need to be always connected to a server -- and those Fridges stop working when the servers go down. We've seen it for speakers, cameras, home automation, coffee makers etc. It's only a matter of time.

You should always remember, the server ALWAYS goes down. Might take years. Might even be a couple of decades. But someday, it'll all be gone. If you don't have a local/physical copy, too bad.

@turtlefish:

I don't want to single the poster out as it's up to everybody to decide how the feel about this issue, but, this thought process is exactly why always on has become a problem. A lot of people think this way - the game is good, I'll take the hit to my consumer/privacy rights.

I really don't believe that to be the case the vast majority of gamers only play a few titles a year FIFA/COD etc and rarely go back, the most popular games are GAAS always online mp titles, people simply don't care and never have.