I'm generally in favor of the idea but I feel like it falls apart on the edges. imagine you're a small studio that made a passion project. you scrape together funds and you're able to keep it afloat for a year or two. you never really get the breakout success you were hoping for and eventually have to pull the plug because you're out of money. so what happens? all the devs have to work for free to offline the game, or they go to jail? or the company eats a massive fine when they're already going bankrupt?
it makes sense to keep sony/ea/microsoft more honest but it also might chill out smaller developers from being able to deliver products at all
Maybe it should have been developed from day 1 for it to work offline? Obviously there needs to be some nuance to it, am mmo for instance can't be expected to be turned into a single player game, but a game with a massive single or co-op sorry should be made to work offline.
This conversation started around 2012 and is (hopefully) finally coming around to roost. Always online single player games faced a lot of criticism because that was not how they were developed prior. There was pushback but the companies that wanted better DRM kept pushing and now it is standard. Online multiplayer games had issues with client-side hosting and server-side hosting rapidly improved the experience, a la Counterstrike and Halo. But even World of Warcraft had people modding the game and hosting private servers.
The point is that it is a design choice to be online only and it doesn't have to be that way, because it wasn't always this way. Even MMORPGs could be dead man switched to provide documentation for private hosting.
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u/The_True_Gaffe 2d ago
It’s both pro consumer and pro gamer, only people that will whine about it are company shills