My thoughts on Always-Online DRM
If ever there were a popularized feature in gaming I wish I could kill, it would be online DRM.
I can live with having to, a decade from now, search the internet for weeks to find disparate parts to a game which is no longer sellable, and no longer easy to find, because it never physically existed. (That is, if I had a choice between that and online DRM.)
I can even live with developers trying to boost their margins with microtransactions as long as they're not made mandatory.
What I cannot live with are games designed in such a way as to never be resurrected after support for them is dropped. There are certain games designed which will inevitably encounter a similar death -- MMOs and online-multiplayer-only games being the main culprits.
But for singleplayer or multi-modal experiences, I'm not sure history will look kindly on what the last generation has done to game collectors, game preservation or game playability and longevity.
Gaming as a service is thus: a temporary entertainment stopgap, never to be revisited after the winds change. What you would have is effectively a memory which you can never look back on yourself years from now. All flashbacks would have to be pre-recorded for future consumers; one could never go back and legally see what once was.
The saying "Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" can probably be shoehorned in here as a grave warning to those who cannot reference the past to experience it and learn from it years from now.
One cannot avoid this with online-only DRM without asking gifted people to bring the code to its knees at some point in order to play it after it leaves our stores. I don't want that to ever be the norm in this industry. Sadly, that is increasingly becoming the case for a number of good, and bad, reasons.
As a footnote: even the FASHION industry, designed to be termporal, will allow you to wear the same clothes after they go out of style.
I will never understand how in a broad sense an art/entertainment medium like video games can be in some cases designed, and sold as, a more temporary product than fashionable clothing, even if both are art.