World of Warcraft is always online. It won't work without online connection. BUT the game is a MMORPG. An online multiplayer game requiring an online connection makes sense. A single player game requiring an online connection just so that it can do some calculations on servers is not the same.
This assumes that the only reason the internet/cloud/servers/etc. should ever be used is for multiplayer games. I guess I don't agree with the arbitrary need to limit developers like that.
Using servers for calculations can be done to any game in theory. Which means that sentence of yours makes no sense. It's not a specific type of game. It's about games, that are doing some calculations on non-player-owned servers, which can be shut down at any time (see that always-online Sim City).
Well, yes. Developers are trying to accomplish other types of game design features with calculations on servers beyond just multiplayer. Whether it works or not is up in the air, and I'm not saying that it's always 100% awesome (as you mentioned, it seemed to fail for Sim City), but that doesn't make it DRM. It makes it an internet-required game, like multiplayer-only games.
And yes, anything that's on a server can be shut down, which is a risk to literally every online service, message board, multiplayer game, etc. But I don't think that should mean "developers, don't make games with internet features", because that seems arbitrarily restrictive to me.
I guess I'd much prefer to let whatever game come out, and succeed or fail on its own merits. I don't think the gaming industry as a whole will be "hurt" by that.
I'm saying that the implementation has extremely negative consequences for the games themselves and for consumers.
What other consequences are there beyond "the game might be great, or it might be terrible"?
It has all sorts of issues just like Microsoft's original always online DRM had. Well, it's actually worse than for example calling home every 24 hours. These games would simply require a constant and perfect internet connection all the time or at least would look way worse without it. And there is simply no way around that. That's my problem with this technology.
Ok, so if you're someone with spotty internet, then games that use this functionality shouldn't be purchased. Just like if you're someone with spotty internet, you shouldn't buy multiplayer games either.
If the game sucks, because it can't handle the random fluctuations of internet connections...then the game sucks. But I'm not seeing why that has some dire consequences for the industry as a whole.
I mean if you are okay with that, why not simply get all your games via streaming and doing everything on Microsoft/Sony servers. There isn't a big difference between those.
Because assuming things are smartly designed, there's a difference between features that don't depend on rapid response being used on cloud servers, and
everything being streamed from cloud servers.
So I may not want my player controls to depend on servers, but world destruction or AI or whatever else may work fine with it. I'm willing to let developers experiment, and then we can see what comes out of it.
(That still doesn't make this DRM.)
Well in one case you don't own anything and in the other case you own a coaster in case they shut the servers down. You turn every game into SOCOM: Confrontation or MAG.
We already know that those servers cost devs/publishers quite a bunch of money per month. What will happen when the publisher goes broke? Who will pay for the servers?
As you said, this can apply to multiplayer games too. All I'm saying (and all my response was attempting to communicate) is that the existence of internet-required features doesn't therefore make internet-required features the same thing as "DRM".
DRM actually has a real meaning on its own, we don't have to use it as a word to scare people away from trying anything that requires an internet connection.