alt Hacker News> And, it is reasonable to expect because, as I said and other old game players can attest to, this was the status quo for games ~15 years ago. This was a change in living memory.
I fear an entire generation is growing up thinking that it is normal and acceptable that products you buy can be remotely disabled by the developer, manufacturer or vendor when it suits them, with no recourse to the person who bought the product.
This is one of those tech nerd debate hills I'm willing to die on: It should be totally unacceptable/illegal for someone else to remotely nerf or destroy a product you bought and paid for.
You just finished praising Steam, the company responsible for the proliferation of DRM technology that does exactly what you claim to hate.
If Steam goes offline, billions and billions of dollars of games go with it. The online ones, the offline ones, all of it. Gone forever. Some will not function at all without Steam servers.
Steam pioneered remote DRM attestations for PC gaming, remote product key validation, always-online dependencies on Steamworks and more.