Thanks for the infodump! : )

Im glad online only games shut down. It's forcing the market to accept that single player games are the real bread and butter of the games industry, and forcing the games industry to gives us better single player experiences as a result.

Having fun with a buddy, drinking beers and shootin' some CODs is fun and all, but it doesn't have the staying power that a good stand-alone adventure story ever did, at least for me.

Let the online component of games die. We deserve better, and shouldn't expect companies to support antiquated servers. Soon, they'll be asking for US to pay for those servers. Have at it, if you want, but I will have no part.

Gabe Newell.

He was the one successful on wide scale with it. AFAIK there where a few attempts before that crashed and burn since they lacked the popularity.

Unfortunately I missed the GOGcast. Just wondering if there was any discussion of those services that pick up the gauntlet after the official multiplayer servers die, e.g. Game Ranger?

The video is still located here. Other than brief mentions that in some cases servers have been reverse-engineered, no there wasn't.
https://www.twitch.tv/gogcom/v/55019972

Darkspore had a single player mode. It can't be played anymore.

Thanks for the info :)

See, this is where I'm going to have to disagree. Consoles can always be repaired, and as systems age, more and more 3rd party repair options pop up from time to time. I've actually got my 3DO coming home from a repair job, after having had my old Xbox, PS2, SNES and Genesis worked on. There's quite the little cottage industry going around repairing old systems, as long as there's at least SOME following to them.

As for day-one patches being mandatory, again my perspective is skewed as I don't play EA games anymore (and always do research before buying anything Ubisoft or Capcom), but I haven't run into that issue. I had a three-month stretch last year where I had no access to anything approaching respectable broadband. Yeah, it sucked pretty hard. However, even with that, I was able to play any game I bought, even without patching them. Considering the size of some of these "patches," I often wonder if they're just DLC hooks. Had to have been the case with Arkham Knight, because the PS4 version played DAMN well out the box.

I find that the issues people complain about are mostly overblown, at least when you get past EA (and sometimes Ubi and Capcom). I find that the sins of EA tend to get broad-brushed onto the rest of the industry, and given that the vast majority of companies are doing right by the consumer, it really irks me. I don't see why we should be painting companies like 2K, Idea Factory, Deep Silver, Aksys, Square Enix, Nintendo, Sony, Bandai-Namco and others into the corner that the bastards at EA occupy. It's the lack of nuance possessed by many in the games media that really rubs me the wrong way.

The worst is single player games that need an online server. Then the server is shut down by EA after about a year and the single player game can never be played again.

Is there a list somewhere of these single-player-time-bombed copies? Is there a word or phrase for it?

Always online.
Diablo III for example.

Online games shutting down is something of an inevitability.

Forcing online only for a single player game is such a bad move.

Diablo3 becomes unplayable on higher difficulties if the ping goes over 100 and the only way to get close to decent loot with the awful rng loot was to crank the difficulty level up. This is pretty unacceptable from a company that has run a "fairly successful" mmo for the past decade or so.

Single player in The Division and having a twitch stream running will give a visible delay between a headshot being fired and landing.

C&C4 was a classic EA mess where they didnt pay enough for decent servers so if there was the smallest wobble in the connection you were disconnected, not told about it and then forced to play through the same sections over and over.

Multiplayer only games are something I'll play if they're free either as F2P or gifted. I'm more of a solitary gamer and find the open communities that appear around some multiplayer games to be filled with arrogant morons who cling to the assumption that they're better having played other games in the same genre rather than engaging their brain and offering tips to new players which would help improve the community. The more closed gaming communities are a harder nut to crack as a solitary gamer.

Might be an age thing but multiplayer games lost a lot of their appeal when they shifted from the splitscreen days of goldeneye into the anonimity of gamertags and open mics.

The longevity of new online multiplayer games can be incredibly short, often linked to how hyped they got prior to launch. Evolve had potential with the asymetric play but they relied far too much on a single mode so it's death was inevitable. How fast it died was a surprise but not the death itself. Titanfall's longevity I think came from it being a console launch title.

Fable Legends was something I'd been playing during the closed beta and I feel MS are idiots for closing it down as it was starting to shape up pretty well. Might not have been enough to keep the bean counters happy but as a game it could have been fun and a good way to promote their whole unified platform currently being talked about. But at the same time going by the xbone's advertising it wouldnt have fallen into their demographic of people who yell YO into the phone when they take a call.

I'm often prone to impulse buys but if I see it's got online req's I'll be much less impulsive. Multiplayer only will really be reliant on how skeptical I am over the games lifespan.

...but will there be an RSS feed?