A growing trend in gaming is that more and more titles require a constant online connection. This is even in games that do not actually use the internet for any of their features and pure single player experiences that never require you to team up with other people over the internet.
There is a temptation to rant about how this is frustrating, because it is. There is a temptation to launch into a tirade about digital rights management, the main reason for a persistent online connection being required and how damaging it is to consumer rights, because it is. There is a temptation to question just how much extra money it costs to run activation servers to monitor these always-on connections and what happens if the company goes out of business and the server goes down, because this is a genuine concern.
Instead, I’m going to comment on just how far the internet has come to actually enable this scenario to even exist, but that it still comes with a price.
The requirement for an always-on internet connection probably started with the introduction of Steam, back when Half Life 2 was released. For any non-gamers, Steam is a phenomenally successful digital distribution hub where you can buy and download games and then subsequently download them to any of your other machines and update them all automatically. It is a fantastic one-of-a-kind service that in my mind has never quite been copied by anyone else and one that proves what can be done to encourage digital sales in the modern era where people feel entitled to digital content for free. It was if not the first significant platform that introduced the idea of online activation, then definitely the first that I remember.
Half Life 2 and the other Valve titles that launched with Steam required an online connection the first time you installed the game so that it could verify that the copy was legitimate and activate it, allowing you then to access the game content. Lots of people forget or ignore the fact this is a form of digital rights management, but it was fairly non-invasive and got out of your way shortly afterwards and in return for the registration with Steam, Valve would keep the game up to date which was a task that was increasingly time consuming with the first Half Life game. Also, once your game was activated, you could play it without an online connection, but this initial requirement was still quite an anomaly back in 2004.
I had friends that bought Half Life 2 when it was released without realising it needed online activation and because they were in student accommodation without the internet, had to wait for the summer holidays when they would move back in with their parents to be able to play it. At the time it was just a quirk of Steam and something that nobody thought would catch on. It was, after all, absurd to require an internet connection for something that you didn’t have to have the internet to use.
Now, online activation or a persistent connection is increasingly popular. The fact that it can even be suggested as a viable feature of any game that’s not a purely online game is due to two things: 1) The fact that gamers have come to accept it and 2) The fact that the internet is now so prevalent that it’s rare a gamer will not have an internet connection.
I am in no way defending it as a practise, but that large studios can get away with putting a requirement for a net connection into their games shows just how far the internet has leapt forward in a very short space of time. I look forward to the day that we can’t remember why it’s a bad idea to require an internet connection and when the always-on connection is as reliable as the computer itself, but we’re not quite there yet. Internet service providers are notorious for sporadic customer service and aren’t always quick to reach the root of problems with their hardware. Going by previous and recent experience, they are prone to take something that works perfectly well and trying to “upgrade” it, wherein upgrade means “trick you out of more money by telling you it’s cheaper and take your working connection and turn it off”. If anyone is rendered internet-less for whatever reason, suddenly their game playing options become limited.
I also feel that although the internet is now in more homes than ever, single player games are shutting themselves out of a much larger market by requiring online activation or a constant net connection, as non-gamers or people that don’t see the internet as a priority in general are much less likely to have an internet connection at home. Although I suspect that many of you reading this blog are like myself and require the internet as much as I require food and drink, for some people it is just where Facebook lives, and they check that when they’re at work. I don’t mean that to sound superior or patronising in any way, there are just a lot of people out there who haven’t yet discovered that they love the internet.
These non-gamers could just be the next big untapped demographic in gaming that could breath fresh life into the industry, and yet publishers run the risk of shutting them out by raising the bar to entry to include an internet connection at home. I realise this is highly speculative and that the main offenders of the requirement for the always-on internet connection aren’t exactly producing titles to appeal to non-gamers, but in principle it could be damaging if the idea spreads. I am a firm believer in the fact that a lot of people love video games, but they just don’t know it yet because they haven’t found the right one for them.
The internet and a constant connection to billions of other computers in the world can facilitate great things and allow you to do highly intelligent things with your entertainment, but in this case it can also restrict the experience that you’re trying to get across to your audience. An always-on internet connection will probably not be an issue or anything to worry about in ten years time, but right now, we’re still too fresh from the step away from dial-up being the most common form of access. It is definitely the case that the internet and web technology has come on leaps and bounds in a very short space of time, but it is still very much a developing frontier and needs some more solid foundations before anyone starts building anything that relies on it completely.
Additional Notes:
For anybody wanting to get into games, you could do a lot worse than taking a look at Steam. As well as a few free titles and frequent sales, it lets you download free demos, and I think that playing demos from the covers of magazines is how most PC Gamers got into gaming when they were younger in the first place. With Steam, you don’t even need to buy the magazine.