It's a big fucking problem, if you ask me. You pay $60 for a single-player game that you cannot play on your laptop on vacation because of crappy WiFi, or just because your ISP sucks? What-the-actual-fuck.

Does this actually happen though? I mean, I acknowledge the theoretical possibility. Is it a commonplace occurrence? It's never happened to me, personally. If it did I'd likely be frustrated but I'd just play something else for a few days.

To give an example from my own experience, a 13-hour flight is one of the most annoying places to find you can't play the game you'd been expecting to play, and you may not be able to just grab another one.

What 13 hour flight has power outlets that will output the 100+ watts you need to play Red Dead Redemption 2?

This was a Virgin Atlantic 747 (Hong Kong - London). I have a Surface Book 2 which I know has an unusually low-powered power supply (such that gaming will drain the battery even when plugged in), but given how much power sockets are now normal and expected, I'd be surprised if they couldn't handle most laptops.

It looks like a 4800U can run the game at 30fps low settings, and that's a 15 watt part.

And the issue applies to other games and intermittent play too.

I am from Brazil and because of that I never get online-only singleplayer games.

For example I never played Diablo 3, not even in a friend house or a demo (if there is one, I never checked). Ditto for Sim City 5, despite me being a huge fan of Sim City 4.

You did yourself a huge favour by not playing SimCity 5. The sequel to SimCity 4 came out, and it was called Cities: Skylines.

I know.

I nagged EA to let me fix SimCity 4 bugs, but they didn't help.

I found some former employees and nagged them about stuff, interestingly instead the result was being informed they were trying to organize the release of EASTL, so I nagged EA about THAT instead, and kept talking to the employees. That part DID work.

https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL

Even with that I still couldn't figure out how to make a patch for SC4 though. (I want to patch out RDTSC, that is the source of many, many of its bugs. SimCity 4 uses RDTSC to count cycles, that is what RDTSC was supposed to do when originally released, but Intel later changed it to count time instead of cycles, SC4 crashes on modern machines for example is because of that).

It's happening with increased regularity for me in California with PG&E's "Public Safety Power Shutoffs", where even with a generator to power my home apparently my ISP cannot be bothered to install generators to power their facilities – and my cable internet goes down for the duration of the PSPS (aside from the first 1-2 hours, as it appears the ISP at least has UPSes). The most recent PSPS lasted 48 hours.

In 2019, cumulative PSPS time was nearly one week (though I logged it at the time I forget the exact number now, something like 150ish hours).

For clarity: living outside SV, my ISP is Comcast (Xfinity).

EDIT: I'd like to add that phone tethering isn't a great fallback (though it's better than nothing), as literally everyone begins using their cell connection for everything which causes the latency to be very high and the speed to be frustratingly low.

It happens regularly with Ubisoft's Uplay. Like the launcher can't access the Internet so you can't access your games.

I bought two copies of Anno 1404 because I thought I could play with my wife. Big mistake. Uplay is completely busted and I've never been able to get multiplayer working. Wish I could refund that garbage.

The vast majority of the world's population live in places with power outages and flaky internet connectivity. It's extremely commonplace. I live in London and my upstream internet connection is going down multiple times a day at the moment which is extremely frustrating.

It's highly fault intolerant on everything staying the way it is, which means if in the future the internet is temporarily/permanently down for weeks/months for huge swathes of people (e.g. EMP / nuclear war), or the RDR DRM server goes offline temporarily/permanently (will it still be up in 10 year's time?) the game cannot be played. Future fallible not future proof.

Yes. There are plenty of developed countries with awful internet infrastructure. Australia (where I live) is one of those places.

I'm always amazed by this. I live in Vietnam, out of town on a rural road, and I get a solid 60mb connection for both mobile and wired. It's dirt cheap - something like $15 a month for both. Why can't rich countries like Australia manage this? I know population density factors in, but we're not talking about getting data in the outback - just where people actually live.

Because "just where people live" is still a pretty enormous area and there simply isn't political will to build it out properly (See the original NBN FTTH vs the current FTTN rollout).

A lot of the existing infrastructure is very poorly maintained but due to Telstra being privatised back in the 90's but still owning the infrastructure (Under their Wholesale division) the government essentially still has to pay them a fuckton of money to put any new cables in the ground using "Their" conduits.

Our government decided to make our internet infrastructure political rather than choosing what was best for the nation. The right-wing party saw no need for fiber internet, and our left-wing party wanted a proper fiber infrastructure. Australia is massive, and was in dire need of a national infrastructure upgrade.

Rupert Murdoch (who owns Foxtel and a large number of newspapers) is highly right-wing and heavily supported the right-wing government. That government has been changed out since then, but we're left with the lasting effects of their decisions.

It's probably not a common-place occurrence because anyone who doesn't have perpetual connection to internet just avoids things like this.

I just spent the last month in Colorado mountains doing web development without an internet connection (I walked to the nearest spot on occasion for email). We do exist.

It doesn’t need to happen often. Just sometimes would be enough for me to switch the publisher to a list of "never buy-always pirate". Unless it came with a big warning, then I just wouldn’t care and not get the game in the first place.

>If it did I'd likely be frustrated but I'd just play something else for a few days.

Except if every game pulled this crap, then you wouldn't be able to play anything while your internet is down.

Usually, when internet is down, I stop working start playing single player games.

The biggest concern for me is, what happens when you want to play the game again in 10 years time, when the DRM servers are offline?

When you buy DRM'ed media, you are merely renting it for an unspecified duration.

A lot of companies are at least removing the more aggressive DRMs (eg. Denuvo) some time after the prime sales window has passed, at which point they would either have minimal DRM like Steam, or be fully cracked.

Yes. That goes for all media and all software. This whole process gets much easier once you accept that this is actually what you pay for, and anything beyond a short rent, is just a bonus.

Being able to play a game in 10 years, play it offline, or sell it would always be surprising to me. So I wouldn't assume those things to be possible when I buy it.

That obviously makes fewer products worth buying, which saves me money. But quite often both for games and othewr media I come to the conclusion "Yes, I'm happy to pay $60 to play this for 2 weeks even if I never play it again". So long as that's the calculation, there is rarely any disappointment.

I cannot get over this mindset. Are you saying that you are OK with the risk of never getting to re-experience the media that had a formative contribution to your personality during your childhood or early adulthood/teenage years? Your favourite music that brings back memories? There is no guarantee that a particular album or movie will be re-released on a new format. The franchise may never receive a remake, a reboot or a sequel, and there is certainly no guarantee that you will like the creative direction after so many of the original artists/writers have moved on.

10 years passing in the real world shouldn't mean anything to a medium that's frozen in time (like all fiction is). It's still possible to play N64 cartridges, watch VHS tapes, read books. Until they fall apart, that's how long you've got to enjoy them, but they won't do so quickly if you take great care of them. You will be able to pass them on as heirlooms or co-experience them with your descendants. It's a treasured, very human activity. If we don't have memories AND something to care for in the present, what do we even live for? It's not enough to live in the present, we must remain in touch with our heritage.

> Are you saying that you are OK with the risk of never getting to re-experience the media that had a formative contribution to your personality during your childhood or early adulthood/teenage years?

No, I mean I think that's a shame - but I just factor it into the equation.

I'm not describing what's acceptable, I'm describing what I think I'm getting for my money, which can be a factor in whether I decide to purchase something at all, or whether I'm happy/disappointed with it. So if I buy a AAA game now for $80 I'll be happy if I can run it at all for 5 years. If that isn't enough for me to buy it, I won't.

There of course is a secondary question here too: should I buy these games even though I'm then contributing to this poor state of affairs when I buy DRM games rather than voting with my wallet? I don't consider that (Although I'd avoid e.g. buying the Oculus heeadset because of the Facebook thing, but that's a whole different level of evil and also affects me personally more).

> It's still possible to play N64 cartridges, watch VHS tapes, read book

And there are probably tons of things from the period after those (2000-2020) that are forever lost because their DRM servers are dead etc. And tbh. it doesn't make me even a little bit sad.

In 10 years you're better off just playing the 8K remaster on PS6 or maybe just playing red dead redemption 3 which is pretty much the same game but with better graphics and combat.

Yes, the remaster, on a locked-down hardware platform, both of which I will have to pay for again. Hopefully by then I will also be too old to remember what 'anti-consumer' means.

* If you get a remaster at all

* If the current IP owner didn't make a mess of the remastering process (in an aesthetic or technical sense)

* If the remaster is free of defects that make the game unplayable for seasoned users of that game

* If you have the target platfrom of choice that the remaster targets.

In other words, you would have to be very lucky.

Perhaps in 20 years I'll be able to play HL3 instead of HL2 :)

I find that extremely offensive, honestly. I'm not allowed to play a god-damned game that I purchased offline when nothing about the actual game requires network access? That's ridiculous!

Not under all circumstances, no. I was in no way blocked from playing it on a brand new PS4 that was never connected to internet. However I pretty reliably experienced, after leaving the PS4 to sleep for longer than 1-2 days, a severe input glitch when I resumed the game. To fix the glitch I had to restart the PS4 and game, which takes more than 5 minutes. Later I plugged in the internet and the glitch never happened again. I never made the connection between the glitch and DRM, but it seems likely to me now that they are related. I had assumed the glitch was a known bug that the developers were disincentivized to fix because they want the internet connected for telemetry.

Within the last 5 years I know some other studios were focusing on single-player experience at ship time knowing people may only have the disk to play, for exmaple service members serving overseas.