I bet most Steam users don't even know of the offline mode, and which games would work fine with it. To them, Steam in general requires an active online connection, and that's that. And they take it as given, as that that is just the way things are.

Also, since losing one's internet connection tends to cause all kinds of inconveniences to people (Netflix, Youtube, social media, Steam achievements etc. not working), the fact that their games might not work either doesn't seem that unexpected or significant, in the world where so many services require you to be online.

Maybe they are also more eager to buy the argument that since the schemes where the validation is performed only during installation, and not during gameplay, are easier to crack, it is kinda understandable that the publishers make it more stringent, in order to fight those filthy pirates trying to play the game for free. That is their right, they guess.

It is a similar question as to me, can I use Google Maps car navigation on my phone without a mobile internet connection? E.g. this June when we go to Thailand and I am supposed to drive around there in places I don't recognize, and I don't necessarily have a data connection on my phone then (still using Finnish SIM card and don't want to pay for roaming data charges abroad; or even if I have a Thai prepaid SIM, it has a low data cap on it which I don't want to waste on car navigation).

Maybe it is possible somehow (preloading maps to the device somehow etc.), but I wouldn't be surprised either if Google Maps navigator really requires an active internet connection pretty much all the time, maybe being ok with short interruptions here and there and using its cached data then. Or at least using it without a data connection would be inconvenient and very restricted.

So since I am unsure, I am instead going to use a car navigator app (MapFactor) which is specifically designed to be used offline, ie. you download the whole countries' maps to the device before using the navigator etc. No guessing, I know it works as it is designed to do so. Similar to that I buy GOG games with a mindset that they do work offline, even installing it, while e.g. Steam or Epic games can be anything, including requiring constant internet connection, several different online service apps that a game decides to install on its own etc. No guarantees whatsoever.

Not really. I made a distinction for "always online" between requiring an uninterrupted active internet connection all the time where even small hiccups or slowdowns in the connection will affect your gameplay (e.g. streaming games), and schemes where the game e.g. phones home every few minutes, survives maybe a couple of failed connection attempts, but then stops the game if it repeatedly can't connect to the validation server.

Maybe people are still able to make the difference between those two, as the latter affects them much less even with a bit flakier and slower internet connection.

I personally am not fine with either of those, or even if the game requires an online connection only when I install the game. To me they all still cause the game becoming pretty much useless to me, if and when those validation servers that they connect to, go permanently offline. Even if I can continue playing those games that I managed to install before the validation servers went offline.

As for why they fixed that for Crash Bandicoot, maybe its user demographics is the more of retrogamers like you and me, who still have an ounce of that "I want to be able to play it offline"-mindset left. The rest of the games, much less so.

Pretty much this, I guess.

When I think of e.g. my two sons playing constantly on their Android tablets, or watching Youtube-videos, etc., I am sure they don't have a faintest idea whether the games or apps they use require an online connection. If their favorite games or apps don't work because the internet connection is interrupted (e.g. if we are somewhere else, in our car etc.), they don't complain what a shitty game or app it is because it requires an internet connection, but they complain to me that I must provide them an internet connection so that all their apps work again. Which I do, by switching on the internet hotspot feature on my phone.

We'll see how they react when we are abroad this summer, and I can't necessarily provide them mobile internet connection to their tablets. Hey, maybe it is a learning experience, and I can give them a lecture about the virtues of always offline DRM-free gaming! They'll become converts, hopefully.

Why it is a dumb argument? To me that really seems to be reality nowadays.

People don't really keep track how often and in what instances some service or game or app requires an online connection, at least if it doesn't inconvenience them much, or at all.

Besides pricing, that is the hurdle that streamning gaming still has, as it does indeed require an uninterrupted, fast and reliable internet connection, or else the player is affected. That same player in unaffected if Black Ops Cold War makes an online validation check every now and then, as it is much less likely to affect their gameplay, pretty much only if they lose their whole internet connection, in which case they lose also Netflix, Youtube, social media etc.

It is more likely that people who mind the game doing online validations during gameplay, do so more on principle than on practical necessity, and they would mind online validation also during installation. I am like that, it is very rarely if ever that I play on a PC which doesn't have an fast internet connection active... but I still require that my single-player games are like that, ie. that I can use them (= install and play) even if I didn't have an internet connection.

Or to be more precise: the connection to the validation servers is lost, e.g. because those servers are down permanently. In that case it doesn't even matter if I have an internet connection, or not. So the real issue to me isn't so much that the game requires an internet connection, but that it requires a validation from the publisher or service provider, before I am allowed to use the game. Doesn't matter if that validation is performed through internet, a phone call, snailmail or pigeons, I still detest it.

To be honest I'm not seeing anything "silly" in timpuus's, etc, posts pointing out that your question is basically answered by the words "Creeping Normalization". Whether a game needs to go online to authenticate once or constantly to play, in both cases if the server shuts down you're going to need to crack it to get it to work offline after a future OS reinstall. Where's the difference then? As Timpuu said, people who care about it are those who specifically care about DRM-Free / game preservation and are actively testing for it. Those who are always online, always use a client, simply don't stop to think it may be there or have been conditioned to be online for other reasons are less likely to care. In fact many gamers outside the DRM-Free circle are purely reactionary and are only outraged after a game can't be played / content is lost.

Think back to when Half-Life 2 came out and Valve went back on their original word (Steam DRM = multi-player only). The response at the time for many was literally "Steam = No Buy". Fast forward 19 years. Are Achievements, what are my friends playing, Discord chat, all DRM? Technically no. But they do play a part in normalizing a personal 'need' to be online / for a client to play a game 'properly'. Now read the Steam DRM Developer Documentation page ("We suggest enhancing the value of legitimate copies of your game by using Steamworks features which won't work on non-legitimate copies (e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc"). "I don't care about offline gaming because I need to be online anyway to unlock my cheevos, I've heard that only Denuvo DRM is bad" = 'Mission accomplished...'

Another example - Anti-Cheat technologies. When Sony Rootkit came out people (wisely) hit the roof for injecting code into the Windows kernel that simply should not have been there. Today people are accepting TPM-locked, Ring 0 Kernel Drivers anti-cheat like Vanguard that acts like a glorified virus + DRM-on-steroids ("but it's totally not DRM it's anti-cheat (tm)") combined. What changed? Gamers attitudes did in watering every expectation they had into the gutter. The slightest bit of annoyance a cheater may cause in an online game, and they sold out everything. 'Muh convenience' went from simplified to being stupefied. This "I want my dopamine hit at any cost" attitude is why I ditched online multi-player gaming and want nothing to do with such 'communities'.

As for Activision, here's another relevant point I missed from earlier post:-
https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/10/17/activision-files-patent-for-microtransaction-minded-matchmaking-system

^ Basically they patented a way of deliberately mis-matching weaker players with stronger ones whilst simultaneously presenting a way of the weaker play to purchase pay2win items pre-game to better equalize them. How does it "know" so much about a player? The answer is extensive data harvesting:-
https://www.dexerto.com/call-of-duty/activision-patents-reveal-sbmm-systems-potentially-used-in-modern-warfare-1296757

^ And how do you do that? By forcing an always-online requirement into everything (even single-player), mass harvesting data then forming a monetizable profile that can potentially be reused between games. This is really all you need to know about modern Activision's attitudes towards gamers and if harvested data from even single-player games is still useful to analyzing play-styles, then it explains why all their games are online-only. Where's the outrage? As mentioned most of the DRM-Free crowd have already written the whole company off for being offline unfriendly (since Diablo 3), whilst most of the rest either don't stop to think, or don't care "since I can put up with it like I do for Fortnite / DOTA2".

I've honestly just stopped buying the Activision Blizzard garbage. Just like the Marvel superhero movies, they reached a point where they weren't showing me anything new, and all the "shiny" wasn't enough to captivate me anymore. There are better options out there for virtually any of the crap they pump out. If they made anything worth playing, I might be upset. But I've not touched a game of theirs since the first Watch Dogs, and even that was an outlier at the time.

UbiSoft makes Watch Dogs actually, not Acti-Blizzard.

But, your point surely rings true w/ other Acti-Blizz stuff like COD, for sure. And since you mentioned Watch Dogs - no doubt, it rings true for a lot of Ubi's "open-world games and litter the map w/ side quests that are meaningless everywhere" stuff, too.

Sorry, I get these terrible companies mixed up. You're absolutely right. I was thinking Assassin's Creed, a series that started off great and turned into a semi-annual cashgrab. A Far Cry, too for that matter. I haven't played UBI games since Watch Dogs. From Activision, I got Diablo II remastered, I think and that's about it from their recent catalog. I haven't played COD since the... second one? And without searching it, I'm not sure what else they make besides Diablo and COD...

It's your prerogative whether you want to explain your position or not. Certainly no one is forcing you to debate or even to make further comments in the thread if you don't wish to do so. But, given that this is a discussion forum, I will say it would be more fruitful for discussion to elaborate upon your position rather than just stonewalling.

You simply keep repeating the same assertions to those of us who question your position. "It's dumb" is not productive discussion. Walk us through step-by-step of why "it's dumb". You assert that those who disagree are thinking in black-and-white. Okay, so what? Walk us through why it's not "black-and-white."

I'm not trying to annoy you or anything. I legitimately do not see how the distinction you are seeing is meaningful.

You guys seem to be operating from the position that company control is the ONLY reason to care about DRM. It's not. For the vast majority of people the user experience is all that matters, and there's a MASSIVE difference between a brief online check when you install (and likely just downloaded) a game versus a constant and never ending online check whenever you play the game.

To me this is so obvious I literally can't debate it or say it any other way. I'm not trying to be an ass, but I just can't.

Yeah, I recently bought D2 Remastered. Probably the last thing I've also got from Acti-Blizz and on their "meh" store/client-app, since probably D3.

I got other stuff from Acti on Steam - like most of COD's except MW Reboot and newer.

What stinks is a lot of good Acti-Blizz stuff for IP's are sitting there, doing nothing. I'd be down for say Prototype 3, Singularity 2, True Crime 3, and/or even Scarface 2 - but, those probably ain't happening.

There really isn't though in the big picture of things. What are the most popular PC games in terms of player count? Fortnite (350m total players signed up, 3m online at any one time day or night). Top three on Steam? CS:GO, Dota 2, Apex Legends. All of them are always online games and their player count positively dwarfs Black Ops Cold War (that isn't even in the top 100). If "the vast majority of people" cared that "I'm happy with an online DRM activation user experience but unhappy that I can't play my game without the Internet" distinctions at all, then Black Ops Cold War wouldn't have made $678 million in its first 6 weeks. That's the real-litmus test - how well the online-only Single Player title actually sold. If most gamers cared then it would have flopped due to mass boycotts instead of being accepted like Fortnite. But it didn't due to "online habituation"...

As Timppu said, people who want DRM-Free games actually have a practical objective fixed goal (to backup a copy of it for guaranteed future archivability, replayability usage in years / decades time). "Mainstream gamers" don't. They simply increase their BS-tolerance level the more cr*p is thrown at them. As soon as you go beyond that first step ("can this game be installed & run 100% offline in years to come" which genuinely is a black or white, yes / no binary answer), it's just arguing over where on the BS-scale people are happy to personally be.

Those (few) gamers who find that an "inconvenient user experience" but clearly didn't refund their game / refuse to buy because of it, would do well to ask whether it's a natural extension of them not pushing back hard enough when micro-transactions / lootboxes came out and all we heard from some was a spectacularly naive "I'm fine with them as long as I can complete the game without them. They won't affect me". As I linked to in my post, Activision have patents that give them an incentive to make even single player games online-only (beyond just DRM) via harvesting data, then profiling your style of play and selling you in-game items, that's just a natural extension of "harmless cosmetics + telemetry"...

Okay, this is bordering more on a helpful response.

It would vary on the user's internet access, but I assume for most people playing these games they are generally able to access the internet and thus access the game regularly whenever they want.

If that's the case, then there is not a "MASSIVE" practical difference between a one-time check or a persistent always-online check, since their user experience is not significantly impeded.

For a user to be affected, there would need to be several factors too, but chief of which would be that "they're currently playing the always-online game rather than another game where they wouldn't even notice."

Also, an actually DRM-free game is the best in terms of "user experience" since there is no chance it will be impeded even once, let alone persistently a la always-online. You seem to discount that, but I'm not sure why.

^ THIS. A lot of people don't like various directions the industry is heading in but fail to realise it was a lack of "pushback" that just encourages more. As soon as people shrugged with apathy over online activations, then shrugged with apathy over micro-transactions, then shrugged with apathy over in-game telemetry, put the three together and it virtually paved the way for studios now pushing for always-online connections even in single-player to harvest the sh*t out of them to sell them more junk in-game, in an age where highly profilable data is the 'new gold'...

Call of Duty microtransaction sales are four times higher this year compared to last year
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/activision-blizzard-made-12-billion-from-microtransactions-in-just-three-months/1100-6483985

^ The "reason" is right there...

I'm ignoring the "well since you're okay with bikinis on TV I guess you're okay with hardcore pornography" stuff I just don't get at all, but I'll reply to this.

The Crash game and Call of Duty singleplayer campaigns have literally none of these aspects. The only reason they are online only is for DRM reasons. People threw a hissy over Crash and got it toned down, something you guys keep ignoring, so people DO care. I was wrong in my OP to an extent. Call of Duty just gets away with it because the game's audience is 90% multiplayer focused, I'd wager.

Makes sense since they have the data. Wouldnt be surprised if they then altered drop rates for certain drops to encourage users to buy microtransactions in the future.