It's very likely that this was quite common for a while. Certain drop rates - especially when it came to lootboxes/booster packs/card packs - would 'adapt'.
If I remember correctly it was actually China who initiated a stop to that. By law all drop chances had to be made public. If they weren't the game would be forbidden. The publishers tried to find a way out of, but could not. The whole affair also alarmed European and US juristiction and some rules were introduced.

Of course there is never a way to know for sure, but the publishers try to keep their game on the shelves.

Sure, Crash fans cared b/c those are mostly SP games and they got mad - but do COD fans care?

Like you said - COD fans mostly play it for the MP these days.

Of course, you and I say might want COD SP campaigns to work offline - but, is that gonna really happen? Probably not, unfortunately for us.

I would guess dev's are not gonna split the EXE file for SP or MP; or if they are split they ain't gonna change the DRM for each piece b/c it'd be more work to fix/change SP so it works offline. That's more $, resources, and man-power to pump into changing that; they likely ain't gonna do that.

Ever since the success of Modern Warfare, playing Call of Duty only for the single-player will get you responses such as "You buy Call of Duty only for a 5-hours single-player campaign? LOL!" Not to mention that one of the series' recent installments featured no single-player campaign at all. Thus, I find it hardly surprising that an always-online campaign gets, at best, a collective "whatever" from the players.

As for Crash Bandicoot 4, the DRM was never removed from the Battle.net version. That it was removed (or more accurately, not present) on the Steam version might have to do with the game sporting no online features (thus requiring no Activision account, unlike Call of Duty which requires one even on Steam) than Activision having a change of heart and listening to the complaints. That, and maybe the game getting cracked within one day of its Battle.net release.

Frankly ever since we've gone down the DLC there's a definitely mealy sense of content on some games that use to be more meaty, Wipeout and Gran Tourismo come to mind.
When Wipeout HD came out on PS3 what a joke it was in terms of content. Just think, those pos told us that not pressing the disc and all that would allow them to charge less and give the same content. The ONLY time I truly felt that argument and agreed with it was Megaman 9 and 10, that a physical release of those would have been $20 or $30 a piece. Oh and we won't find those on here because for some reason Inti-Creates hates DRM-Free gamers.

I just do not buy games requiring a online connection.

Online games are a exception but nowadays i do not play online games anymore. i just do no have enough of lifetime for this sort of stuff and i wish to get me some real life friends; so there is no need to be online all the time. Actually there is a single Online game i play, but rather occasionally: Phantasy Star 2, and no... i do not pay a single buck for it and it is not a bad game, especially for a "free to play".

Anyway, Online games should be free to play because the money is achieved by selling items, service and whatelse.

There is a fundamental difference, because games who are not Online are not free to play so you pay for the content itself, instead of a service and microsell.

Games that need both or even several payment methods... service payment, microsells and even the game itself to pay: This is out for me... those time is over, we are in another age... at least for me the new age has already started.

I am glad for Activision that their online service works out so well for them, apparently the mainstream got enough of customers left enjoying to be leeched and robbed.

For the Activision games, i really could care less... i do not even enjoy them, strange enough; im glad i got a "special taste".

If people only need a community... there is many launchers available, so there should be zero issues. Online requirement is usually for DRM and to make microsells... (outside of free to play Online games).

I just dont get it why so many people are actually buying... sorry... "this crap". There is so many competition with surely close to equal stuff and with better conditions... and if not... it sounds terrible if there is only one dev able to provide a good game (not for me, but others may feel this way).

The medicine for bad conditions is easy: "Just dont buy it" and then they have to change their way of marketing... as a matter of sheer survival.

What's annoying is that CDPR themselves have started muddying the waters here with their Cyberpunk 2077 and Witcher 3 remaster Galaxy-Exclusive in-game rewards. Sure you only have to launch via Galaxy once and then it's offline for that save forever, and 99.998% of the game is still offline, but the waters have already been muddied. Do we resist, or lower our BS tolerance and see what other crap CDPR will try in the future?

Hardly anyone thinks of what will happen when those authentication services will get retired. Will CDPR bake those rewards into the game itself, or will they just pull a Ubisoft and let them die. I guess time will tell, but I certainly hope modders will make a mod that unlocks this completely offline. It does not matter how insignificant this content is, it is still dipping its toe into DRM waters. It's the principle that matters.

What adds insult to injury is that one of these items, requiring one-time online authentication, claims to be DRM-Free via its in-game description lol.

If the servers are offline, then you'd install CET and run:

Game.AddToInventory("Items.Preset_Katana_GoG",1)
Game.AddToInventory("Items.GOG_DLC_Jacket",1)
Game.AddToInventory("Items.GOG_DLC_TShirt",1)
Game.AddToInventory("Items.GOG_Galaxy_TShirt",1)

Boom. You have your items, without ever using Galaxy :-)

You could remove CET after of course.

For the Witcher 3 armor set there are the following console commands:

additem('Dol Blathanna Armor')
additem('Dol Blathanna Boots')
additem('Dol Blathanna Gloves')
additem('Dol Blathanna Pants')
additem('Dol Blathanna longsword')
additem('White Widow of Dol Blathanna')

Tell me about it. When I saw that for singleplayer campaign I needed to be always online, I went for a refund VERY quickly.

I'd perhaps be inclined to care, if not for the fact that I stopped caring for one company back when it was called Silicon and Synapse, and the other since the late 2000s. As other posters said, there's not a whole lot in their catalogue to care about. There's been what, Four Call of Duty 4s?

Thanks. This may not include the "Shupe the Troll Plushy" for the apartment, but certainly better than nothing.


Thanks.

I'll write both of those down and store them in a text file, next to offline installers lol.

It's a shame because this Black Ops Cold War is much more involved and interesting than the old "5 hours of shooting in a hallway" era of CoD. I played Ghosts a year or so ago and it was awful, This is much better.

Is that the case with those single-player Activision games, ie. there is demand for a constant uninterrupted internet connection? If there is a brief hiccup and some packets are lost, the game aborts?

I would have thought that it only validates the game every now and then (e.g. once a minute or every five minutes) while you play, ie. it doesn't really require an interrupted connection. As long as it can go online every now and then, fine.

If the latter is the case, then I don't agree with you that it would affect most gamers because how many PC/Steam gamers tend to play on PCs where there is no internet? I have done it occasionally, but it is still pretty rare, like:

- I've been in Thailand rural area where I only have pretty expensive prepaid mobile data which is data capped (ie. after a certain amount of GBs is transferred, that's it, no more internet at all, unless I buy yet another expensive prepaid data SIM), so I don't want to use the internet connection unless i really need to.

- I play old CD games on e.g. an old retro-PC running Windows XP, which I don't want to keep online for security reasons.

Pretty much any other time, I do have an active internet connection when I play PC games. And I am pretty sure this is the case with the majority of PC gamers, at least those who have e.g. Steam accounts (which in itself requires internet).

It earlier occurred to me that I could maybe even live with a fact that a single-player game required internet... as long as it doesn't require an online validation to some publisher or store servers. The real problem is that my ability to play the game relies on the existence of certain servers or service, not so much that it relies on the existence of internet.

In this context, I see the existence of internet as similar as e.g. the existence of the power grid. No electricity, no gaming. Similarly, if the internet really vanished, it would affect me a lot in other ways too than merely being able to play my games.

That is not to say I approve the idea of a single-player game relying on the existence of internet, unless it has some damn good reason to do so. But I just don't see that quite as restricting as the requirement for an online validation to certain servers, that WILL go offline at some point.

That is actually one of the reasons why I don't want to use Galaxy to play my single-player GOG games.

By installing and using the offline installers, I come to test it that they actually work as intended, no strings attached. Well, to be really certain, I should disable internet too when doing so...

I haven't seen what happens because I haven't had an internet interruption (that I know of anyway). I live near a major city so that's never really a problem unless it's scheduled maintenance.

From what I've read though it does indeed cut to the menu and yell at you for losing internet. The opening menu of the game logs you in like an MMO as well.

I don't care that much in the case of Activision personally either, though ultimately we all got games we might otherwise be interested in that are impacted by drm (if not established AAA shooter franchises, then something else).

I can empathize with the poster given my similar situation for some other games like popular indie games I'm hearing about, continuations of console games from the SNES/Genesis era that I'll never play (Zelda, Metroid, Megaman) or otherwise games from developers that released past offerings I like drm-free, but for some reason stopped doing so for later titles.

I'm at the point where I can actually say that a game not being drm-free is enough for me to consider it a waste of time playing (some people would call it self-indoctrination, I call it sticking to my guns for something I care about), but I probably didn't start there and I don't expect most people to.

I've actually been made aware of that fairly recently when my wife, who is a Nintendo fan, wanted me to catch up on the Zelda games and to my surprise, I found that I didn't really want to invest the time when I had so many drm-free games to play in my backlog. That was an eye opener for me concerning where I'm at psychologically with this.

I think it is in great part due to a contemporary brand of short-sighted consumerism, where short-term gratification matters a lot more than any long term strategy. I believe it was always part of the human condition to some extent (focusing on short-term goals and not worrying about long-term consequences), but I think contemporary society in well off countries has exacerbated those traits.

To be fair to some though, I believe there is a segment of the gaming population that are very casual gamers and don't care that much about gaming. To them, maybe it wouldn't be a big deal if they lost access to their games.

But anyways, all that to say that I think appealing to conscientious consumerism in others given where we are at this point is a futile endeavour.

There will have to be some kind of stressor I think: Either a powerful/charismatic group of people with a lot of clout that will catapult this in popular consciousness (unlikely I think) or more likely, some "disaster" that will have a meaningful impact in people's short term (like Steam going out of business, significantly changing its business model or just becoming less forebearant with the vast amount of authority they have given themselves... it will certainly be an interesting time when Gabe kicks the bucket).