They do it because if you have to be online, connected to their servers, you have to look at their store and be tempted to buy something else for the game. It’s also just straight DRM. The industry spent the better part of 20 years complaining about piracy and used game sales, and now they’ve found a way to defeat them by just designing their games to disappear when the servers are gone. That does come with a catch though. Building and maintaining the online infrastructure costs a lot of money, and given how many of these games just instantly flop and die, customers are less willing to invest their time and money into a game unless they know it’s a winner, which has less to do with the game’s quality and more of how many other people perceive it to be quality. This looks to me to be why the industry is crashing right now.

As egregious as horse armor was decades ago, that doesn’t offend me the way server requirements do (you can always just choose not to buy the horse armor and still have the game you bought in perpetuity). If the game requires an online connection, don’t buy it. There’s always another game out there like it without the requirement. A game that requires an internet connection is just a worse version of a game they could have sold you without it, and the online requirement gives it an expiration date. If multiplayer requires an online connection, make sure it supports LAN, split-screen, direct IP connections, or private servers. This information is very hard to find just by store pages, perhaps intentionally so, but I usually check on the PC Gaming Wiki these days; otherwise you have to hope the developer responds to a question about those features in the Steam forums.

The only time I will find acceptable the presence of an online service in a mostly single player game is when it complements it, and will still operate gracefully if disconnected.

Fuck these games that just stops working when they pull the plug on the servers.

I don’t really have an opinion either way for “always online” but live service (games as a service) makes me actively avoid that shit.

It’s perfectly fine to “finish” a game (maybe after a year or two) and move on to making the next. You don’t need to have a 10 year plan to try and keep it relevant.

the short answer as we all know, they are able to sell our data & show more ads, also the publisher’s shareholders want our data

This is one of many reasons why I boycott a lot of AAA gaming companies nowadays. Not going to name names here, but they know who they are. I prefer indie devs/pubs, and stay the fuck away from anyone pushing FOMO crap, especially pre-order/early access DLC packages.

I can’t claim I’ve never been part of a live service trend. I played a lot of Dead by Daylight (probably still will, just feeling it’s in a downturn) and bought into cosmetics and new characters - likely for a decent amount of money over time.

Honestly, once a dev has a formula that’s successful, it does make sense to just slowly iterate on the formula, give it out for free, and sell cosmetics, instead of trying to find a reason to write 8 new levels/characters and call it a “sequel”. But I can also admit most games have applied at least a few scummy practices to get that in place, and it victimizes a lot of players.

I will also remind people not every single DLC item is scummy. It’s worth evaluating each for yourself, as well as using basic consideration to ignore the ones you don’t want (and don’t complain about them if the game never visibly advertised them to you). For instance, Witcher 3’s extra story content would technically count as DLC - and most say it’s worth it.