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.