Let me clarify:
Why should you care?
1. More choices in the present, being able to play offline against bots is an option, so is playing in LAN, so would be being able to host your own server either on rented hardware or on your own, or playing on the official servers. It's more ways to play the game making it accessible to more people. If your only choice is playing on the official servers causes several problems you wouldn't have if you had more choices to play whenever there's something wrong with the server or your connection.
2. Preserving the game for the future. Always online games are built to be killed, every single one of them will be become completely unplayable forever one day once the servers are shut down. If you are not forced to rely on them because there's offline mode and ability for anyone to make their own server this ensures the game will live on forever, good examples of these games would be DOOM, Quake and Unreal Tournament for example, this used to be the norm when people cared.
Yes this is all about control and here's why:
Since the business model started shifting away from monetizing copies sold to monetizing game time it's in EAs interest to kill this game once they don't feel like it's a worth while investment, and while it is the game experience will suffer because they will mess with the gameplay in various ways to incentivize purchase of additional content, they have many patents registered like the ones that artificially change the difficulty of the game (yes even in multiplayer) to make you spend more time in the game and therefor more money. This provides a bad or at least worse player experience than games that don't do this therefor it's in their interest to limit your choices because if anyone could just spin up a server without these drawbacks everyone would play on there have more fun while spending less money which is bad for EA. Perfect example is the older Battlefield games, many players prefer playing on the community servers where admins kick the cheaters and other type of undesirable players which provide a better experience than official servers. It's important to note though that servers can not be hosted on your own hardware or any cloud provider in these titles either, they can only be rented through EA's systems which ensure they can still add undesirable things into the game but it's still better than nothing having the choice at all like in Battlefield 2042. Though being able to self host servers and playing against AI offline would be obviously better. Just like real mod tools would be significantly better than Portal but then again if modders can make a better game than EA for free it's in their interest to not let that happen.
To the ones saying "EA is not a charity, they wanna make money this makes them more money" Yes you're 100% right, i've just explained above, I though do no work for EA nor own shares of them therefor their profits are not anything of interest to me, I'm just someone who wants to have fun playing games and it's in my best interest to call out decisions like this from the developers that negatively affect player experience. Why should they listen to me? They probably shouldn't as long as people keep paying them no matter the quality of the product but i will not unless at least some of the things i suggested aren't implemented in some capacity, Battlefront 2 bots come to mind again, that's a decent compromise. I can not purchase a product that can at any second be completely taken away from me though and that's that.
@tyl0413You have used this several times now so I need to ask.....
How do you spin up and host servers when you are offline?
Also, pretty much everything that can be bought will have an expiration date sooner or later.
How long do you expect to be playing it?
Let's assume BF2042 eventually gets offline, what happens when BF7 eventually comes out without offline, are you going make the same song and dance about it or be happy you can carry on playing your 2,5 or 10 year old game offline?
(we all know the answer to the last one)
@Trokey66
1. On a LAN, just multiple PCs connected to each other but not to the internet, again something you can easily do with games like Quake or Counter Strike (even Global Offensive and it doesn't even interfere with their F2P business model which is further proof even with the most anti-consumer business models you can find a way to implement the features i suggested without hurting profits, if they did i'm sure Valve would remove it).
2. Those games do not have an expiration date, as long as there exists a machine that can run them or emulate them in the future they'll be playable, they were developed in a way that makes it very easy to preserve them. Always online ones sometimes can be preserved if a private server emulator can be developed but that's significantly harder and therefor rarely happens.
3. I personally? That doesn't really matter. I already got to play many of now shut down always online games and even if i never again wanted to touch them it's really sad that now the decision that i or anyone else can't make for themselves because it's been made by the developers for us that no one can ever again play.
4. Yes, i play loads of games released 2,5,10,20+ years ago
Games do not go bad as time passes. Graphics or certain mechanics will age but a good game will always be a good game and worth revisiting, it's quite sad if you think these days games don't offer anything that's worth keeping around in the future, or are strait up so bad you're okay with them being killed. If that's the case why play them now. Thought you have a point, sports or modern mobile games are certainly not something most people will miss but even with that i'd rather them not be killed. I or anyone else shouldn't be the one to decide for you if you should be able to play a certain game or not.
