It's gonna be hard to carve out that niche or serve as a secondary console until the costs go way down, though. At current prices, simply sitting on current gen boxes is a much better option. I suspect all three consoles will struggle to prove their value for a while.
I do wish I could just play Pokemon on my Vita and be done with it though. :p
It's the only way to keep the heat off from both sides at once, really.
I think it's also a generational thing, too.
My guess is that a lot of the people who are most upset about this grew up with the older generations of consoles, where these measures weren't possible and the industry was small enough (and the games cheap enough) to tolerate resales. But now you have kids growing up with online passes, free-to-play, and digital-only games on smartphones and tablets.
As those kids grow up, and the network infrastructure gets better in the big markets for games, will this stuff even be a point of contention anymore? I feel like we're the last generation of gamers that are going to make a big stink about this, online or off. That gives it a depressing sense of inevitability.
And that's the main thing that bothers me about it.
A game that requires an online connection to play has no sense of permanence. Once they stop supporting it, then what do you do? It's not like with, say, online multiplayer servers going down, as that doesn't affect every game equally (or at all); surely people should at least be able to play the single player parts at least?
Well, in the wake of the ever increasing bloated budgets, they have to grub for every penny they can get. Still doesn't mean I have to like it, though.
Seriously. Maxis/EA in particular kept going on about how they HAD to make the game always-online. They even calling it an MMO, despite it being proven that the single player campaign works just fine offline. Yet somehow, they weren't able to anticipate demand and plan ahead accordingly? Give me a break.
I agree that they're marching towards these restrictions as quickly as they can, though. Several companies are convinced that they have to take this route to protect profits, and won't back off until it completely blows up in their faces. And the sad part is that there's no real guarantee that it won't if they can get around the technical issues--most people aren't going to care as long as it works.
I can't wait to see more disastrous launches caused by this nonsense. It's gonna be a blast.
And thank God for that.
There'll have to be millions of people who agree with you to change their mind.
At this point, I think they just see pissing off people online as collateral damage that won't hurt their bottom line in a big way. I think there are plenty of execs who agree with "Sweet Billy" on this issue.
If any two companies have zero fucks to give about alienating the internet at this point, it's EA and Activision. Most people playing Madden and COD won't give a fuck unless we see more SimCity-esque failures--and even then, I don't know how much of an issue it'll be if it becomes standard practice.
Not if it's mobile... XD
