this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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Thing is that most games on physical media aren't much good in the long run either for the very same reasons. Even the single player ones have a myriad of little bits and bobs of online connectivity nowadays. I expect 95% of them to break once their servers go down. Most of them for super stupid reasons..some version mismatch here, a weird timeout in the launcher there. And being on closed systems,.there will be no way to patch them by the community on consoles.
The only games I expect to still work are Nintendo games. That's not because they are the good guys but because their understanding of this whole internet thing is so laughably bad.
Nintendo had games breaking at parts because of interrupted services, even games that are single-player or playable offline.
Some examples :
Fire Emblem : Shadow Dragon has a shop that connects to the internet and is the only place where you can get an item required for a specific class promotion. I shit you not, the only reason it needs access to a long dead server is to check the current date, because the shop's content depends on the day of the month.
Similarly, Metroid Prime 3 and Metroid Prime Trilogy had an "online" component... Some of the in-game rewards could only be obtained by spending "friend credits". What happened is you earned a credit, you couldn't spend it yourself, you had to send it to a friend and have them do the same for you. This was the only way the games used the online service. Bonus, they rereleased Trilogy on Wii U, long after the server shutdown, and did not do anything to let you go around that.
And also on the Wii U, Mario Vs Donkey Kong Tipping Stars had a level designer. You could unlock parts for the designer with stars, earned by playing levels... Shared on miiverse. They shut down Miiverse, even before the end of the console's (short) life, and they even kept selling the game after that, with only a short message to warn "not all functionalities" were available. The truth is that without the miiverse stars you could barely unlock anything for the designer, so it was basically useless even for offline.
Most of the "physical" media games are just launchers to download a copy anyway. Modern gaming outside of GOG or places that allow you download DRM free, fully offline functional games (at least for single player) are the only thing I would consider when thinking about whether you "own" the media. But the most popular methods for getting games through Xbox, Playstation, or PC (Steam, Epic, etc.) you only "own" it as long as the company continues to allow it.
I mean, even like 10 years ago when I bought a PS4 for Christmas for our kids, it was a pretty fucking disappointing Christmas Day because opening the console you have to update before you can use it, and none of the discs we bought were actually playable without gigs of downloads. I don't think anyone got to play anything until like 9pm that day.