[ferbivore]

All games with a budget over $10m will be online-only gacha soon enough because it would be fiscally irresponsible to do anything else. The only reason you can still "buy" large games - to whatever extent you still can, you're mostly leasing games if you don't pirate them anyway - is irrationality and inertia on the part of publishers, which I doubt will last forever under shareholder pressure.

A lot of games are already nearly impossible to preserve because they use DRM and anti-cheat systems that only a handful of people in the world could crack. Maybe in the future more people will learn, but I think it's more likely the opposite will happen and these people will be fully outcompeted by DRM providers.

I wish there was a way to prevent this, but I don't see it. You would have to outlaw SaaS in general. I mean, that sounds like utopia to me, but there's no chance any country would go for it.

[Wowfunhappy]

People were predicting this a decade ago but somehow we're still getting games like Tears of the Kingdom and Expedition 33.

[proc0]

I think that's true for multiplayer games, which is understandable because they are more like platforms, even social media, because it has to support a community of people that play with each other.

Single player games will still exist though, and companies will still try to make them online games that can be patched often and have online stores (latest assassin's creed does this), but we should all agree this is no longer the same product. If a single player game becomes a service, it is no longer about a self-contained experience that exists like a movie or book. I guess here is where consumers need to demand that certain game genres be treated as art, and as such be sold like products instead of services.

[kbolino]

There's definitely been a shift in what it means to be a multiplayer game. Live service games are crowding out the other forms.

Split-screen, LAN, and even Internet play without fixed servers all existed once upon a time (and still do, to a limited extent). But they aren't what people usually mean when they say "multiplayer" anymore. However, they all have the advantage of staying playable basically forever, with the only real limitation being the ability to emulate older tech.

[pjmlp]

The reason being timesharing seems to be the only way to force people to pay for digital goods, including developers.