Multiplayer has always been included with D3. And singleplayer mode still exists. But, let me add a different examples.

Doom Eternal's campaign can be played offline, but only after you've signed into your account.

Genshin Impact is online only, even though you can play it alone.

AFK Arena, a mobile singleplayer-only game, requires you to be online.

Crash Bandicoot 4, a singleplayer-only game, requires you to be online.

> That system applies only to online games.

I don't know a lot about the system, so you are likely right. But I have to ask, is there anything that restricts it to multiplayer online games only - aside from the current policy?

I never played Diablo 3 (because it's online-only) so I honestly don't know if the auction house is available on single player or not, but I'm going to assume that it is. OK. What if I have no interest in the auction house? What if I'm somewhat interested in it, but would much rather not be forced to connect to any service in order to play and consider not using the auction house a fair trade? It would be trivial to design the game so that it only connects when you try to use the auction house and to remain offline otherwise. In fact such an implementation is much simpler than to arbitrarily move critical components of the game onto a remote server. The only reason to do that for an optionally single player game is copy protection.

So yes, people nowadays expect online features, but this is a fact that's convenient for companies. And no, it's not a conspiracy. A conspiracy is an agreement between parties to perform an illicit act. What we have here is various separate parties independently converging on the idea that eroding private property rights (namely, your ability to play the games you bought unimpeded by any external factors) ensures future profits. If you haven't seen it, I recommend Ross Scott's series on dead games, to see how destructive this practice is.

The problem is that most people's perception is that it really doesn't need to, that the core engine could have been implemented to run entirely locally and the online-only features would be optional.

It's all well and good if the game has social features or other enhancements that are only enabled if you are online. But could the game have been implemented such that the core single-player gameplay is available without an internet connection?

Most people perceive the answer to that question to be "yes". If the answer truly is yes, then implementation of the game in this way is DRM.

>> this is a primarily multiplayer game

If that's true, I'd say the one-star reviews are just as justified. This game was marketed as the continuation of a series that has been predominantly single-player. I'd say there's a reasonable expectation that the game should work without an internet connection. I wouldn't expect World of Warcraft to work without an internet connection, but I expect SimCity to. I wouldn't expect Dead Space 3's co-op to work without an internet connection, but I would expect the single-player campaign to work without one, and it does.

I generally dislike multiplayer in games and only really play single player games. I don't have much interest in multiplayer games at all really - I find other players ruin my experience and wreak the immersion. The only games I like to play multiplayer now are Minecraft and Terraria. I do occasionally play first person shooters multiplayer, but its fairly rare. In fact, the last few times it was two player split-screen modern warfare with someone who was sitting beside me.

So it should be obvious that I have nothing to gain from requiring a constant internet connection. I saw somewhere that Blizzard were saying they are requiring this so you can migrate characters between single and multiplayer without the risk of players cheating - this is just not a use case for me at all because I will never migrate my single player character to multiplayer. I'd much rather have an option to make a single player only character that doesn't require constant internet.

So besides not wanting or needing that feature, why else do I not want to be forced to be online all the time? I don't usually play games on a laptop while traveling, so that doesn't apply to me, but while I do have reasonably fast internet, over the past year I have had random disconnections (mostly due to issues with wifi, including wireless adapter breaking and wireless interference) and the occasional outage. Usually when my internet isn't working, since I use it for work, I will fire up a game for a little while until the internet is working again or until I feel like fixing it. I've already been bitten by steam a few times so I now default to leaving it in offline mode, only going online when I want to check for updates or buy/install a game. In the past three months, I've been irritated more than a handful times that I couldn't play certain games because I didn't have an internet connection for whatever reason. While this alone wouldn't put me off buying a game, coupled with my overall distaste for multiplayer, I don't see why I should have to pay (in frustration) for being online when I play a single player game.

So, for those reasons, I will never buy Diablo 3, even though I was looking forward to it.

This is overstating the (very real) problem. While there are certainly classes of games for which this is true, the majority of games work totally fine offline forever.

Your example, Overwatch, is an online-only multiplayer game. Yes, it's bad you bought a disk that's now just a coaster. But, I don't think it's representative of the vast number of single-player games for which servers don't even exist. There are certainly single-player exceptions (GTA V, the recent Hitman trilogy, etc), but.

There's also a set of PC games from the early aughts that depended on the now-defunct Gamespy servers to run. There's a fairly complete list here (https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/22fz75/list_of_games...). While that's certainly not 0, it still doesn't strike me as "almost everything".

Also worth noting that I'm not defending these systems - just nothing that it's not as bad as you make it out to be.

I don't particularly think they are wrong. For example, after a while, the ridiculous ease of obtaining hacked items ruined single-player for me -- it would be more fun I'm sure to have to work for everything, but I don't have the willpower or incentive to do that unless it's forced on me.

Look at Minecraft. There are multi-hundred player online servers that do great business by providing a persistent world where people have to work for things, making their money by giving diamonds and perks to donors. Not many people play single-player religiously. It's fun for a while, but the main demographic that plays offline is almost certainly the hopeless creatives. (And there's a lot more people who are into competitive/cooperative rat races than are endowed with both a self-motivating sense of design and a bunch of free time.)

I disagree with this. EQ and WoW are fundamentally multi-player games. Without multiple players, the game ceases to be anything special. In both cases, there is extensive content that you cannot complete without large raiding teams.

The Diablo series however has always been a single-player game with an added multiplayer component. You don't need teammates to access any of the content, and you never have. A large portion of players play the entire game alone, which is something you could never even hope for in EQ or WoW.

I think a more apt comparison would be to something like Borderlands, which is a single-player game that can be played cooperatively with friends.

Well, if the players still had to be connected to the servers (always-on) to play, maybe the same problems would arise even though the players wouldn't be interacting.

The strange aspect of this is that their infrastructure seems to be static. In this modern age of cloud computing, why not make the number of game servers elastic? That would bring safety to them and savings by reducing the number of idling servers when demand is low.

It's essentially the Ubisoft Route (Assassins Creed 2 et al) that everybody was incredibly critical of, and they actually removed it by now.

But when golden boy Blizzard pulls shit like that, suddenly everybody is like "Awwww, yeah Diablo!" and I see only few criticisms about the always-online system. (compared to Ubisoft)

One of the reasons I heard for the missing offline single player was "Cheating vs. Real Money Auctionhouse". This seems fallacious to me. Just provide an offline mode that is completely separate from the online part and also separate from the Auctionhouse.

shrug

A lot of titles are more or less serverless peer-to-peer.

It was a single player game. There was never anyone to play against. The online aspects were for DRM only.

On The Crew (which I have not played) if there is truly a single player component that does not rely on any server side systems, than I agree. Online DRM should not exist.

However the OP used "Many of today's GaaS are single-player games that have no business at all being online-only" which a single player game is not a GaaS. Those 2 things cannot be the same.

The problem is the FAQ tries to make claims about truly online games and how those also should somehow be preserved, which is a very complex problem.

So to be clear, I fully agree that if it is truly a single player game than yes that should be able to be played without an online connection. However the OP and this website is conflating 2 massively different things and makes standing behind it impossible.

This is the part which is most relevant and a reason to stay clear of "online only" releases if your main interest is single-player.

Right, because I said "multiplayer", obviously I meant "multiplayer over the internet".

Multiplayer would work by letting you connect however you want.

> you're asking vendors to potentially do some pretty major re-architecting.

From a game architecture perspective, there is no difference between connecting to someone else over the internet, and connecting to someone else over a LAN. As far as the networking stack is concerned, the difference is that in the second case, you're most likely using IP addresses that are reserved for non-internet use.

But wait, there's more!

> How else would online multiplayer work?

You could just... NOT require a registration when connecting to the internet. Remember what I said about requiring a serial number? Try thinking of a more iconic, prototypical example of DRM.

> GOG's games are entirely DRM-Free for single-player and local multiplayer.

No, they're not, this is just false.

In that case, I agree with the fact that the single player component should be made playable without needing to be online.

However I from what I can tell the person who has made the site also has pushed back against entirely online games and GaaS, which eventually shut down.

I stand by my opinion here that we are looking at a campaign that is talking about 2 massively different issues, trying to address them with the same thing.

The answer to this problem is simple, stop making actual single player games that require a constant internet connection.

Any talk about multiplayer games, MMO's, etc (in the FAQ) is making this entire discussion confusing and that is a very different problem to single player games being inaccessible.

Except there is - have you played recent games like Watch_Dogs 1 or 2? Your single player gaming is interrupted/sprinkled in with online events. And it works really nicely sometimes. You'll go to start a single player mission, but someone is hacking you, so you have to stop them first.

Of course you can turn it off in the settings..