Games

Even if I wanted to cheat in some old God of War games (I don't), so what? Who does that hurt?

What I don't trust, for good reason, is that that server will always be there to authenticate my game. Allegedly it requires talking to their server at first install, and that works now in the year 2025, but who's to say it will be there in 2035?

Splinter Cell: Blacklist came out in 2013. A friend of mine bought it this past winter sale. The UPlay launcher that existed when that game came out has now been renamed and reworked, and the launcher that comes up when he tries to play it asks him for a product key that he was not provided (there is a function for this in the Steam overlay, and we checked, and it was not available for this game). Now I'm sure that he could eventually get it working if he had the patience to wait through Ubisoft support, but A) he shouldn't have to, and B) what if Ubisoft goes out of business in the next couple of years? That's not an unlikely scenario at this point, and all the online requirement did was introduce an additional point of failure in the thing that he paid money for. I'm old enough and have been playing games long enough to see these points of failure rear their heads plenty of times now.

The login requirement for the likes of Diablo 3 and 4 are exactly why I'm not buying Diablo 3 and 4. Honestly, even Steam's DRM, which isn't present on every game and usually works seamlessly, has still caused some friction for me lately, and every time it annoys me, I get that much closer to only buying games on GOG. The threat of these games getting an online requirement patched in after the fact is enough to make me rather emulate them than deal with that nonsense, if I was so inclined. If they put their games on GOG, I don't have to trust them, because it's impossible for them to do that to me.