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.
Log in to comment