"Former CEO of Electronic Arts: gamers will 'learn to love' always-online gaming"

[kane_magus]

What a dumbass.

No. No, I won't "learn to love" always online. It will never happen. Simple as that.

Comments

[hikarugenji]

I guess the real question is, will enough gamers learn to love (or at least learn not to mind) always-online to the point where you don't matter any more.

What never makes any sense to me is that all these people defending always-online gaming just talk about the benefits of online gaming, or online components to games, without explaining why *always* online is necessary for those (other than DRM).

[kane_magus]

There's so much else about modern gaming nowadays that I dislike, stuff that just about everyone ridiculed when it first started appearing (paid DLC, for example) but which now is just taken for granted, that I don't doubt for a minute that enough people will sooner or later "learn to love" always online such that those of us who hate it won't matter. When I said "it will never happen" I was merely referring to myself learning to love it, not anyone else.

As for the why, there really isn't a valid reason other than DRM, but the pubs/devs can't just come out and say that, and will, in fact, often outright deny it, like Peter Moore recently did with the SimCity DRM. Instead, they repeatedly frame it with flowery BS, and eventually people start to buy into it (e.g. gamers who defended and still to this day defend games like Diablo III and SimCity and C&C4 and various Ubisoft games and so on). And then, when they get enough people to buy into it, as above, the rest of us just won't matter anymore, same as with every other stupid

[dmjewelle]

I always remember when Apple revealed the iPad and iPhone and when people complained certain features weren't available they said people would just get used to it, and they did.

I don't think everyone would LOVE "always online" due to the constant inconsistency of internet, but it would be something everyone would just get used to.

[kane_magus]

That is a recurring theme over the past decade or two. The game/software industry introduces something that a lot of people hate at first, but then after several years of it being the de facto standard (and despite the fact that said thing just gets egregiously worse as time passes), people just accept it as normal and can scarcely even remember a time before it was in place. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Again, for example, consider paid DLC. When that first started popping up, a lot of people hated it. *cough* horse armor[1]*cough* (Hell, in the case of the horse armor, some people literally thought it was a joke, given that it was originally released only a day or two after April Fools' Day.) And that was back when DLC only cost $2 and was released at least a few weeks after the game itself had already been released. Now, fast forward seven years or so, and not only do you have day 1 on-disc DLC that costs $10-$20 or more, but you also have people not only accepting this but some of them actually rabidly defending it. And it's not