When EA announced that their current Need For Speed would require players to always be online, they stirred up a lot of commotion and gamers even made a petition. An honourable attempt, but for the wrong reasons.

Understandable concerns, especially since it is not the first game series that has adopted always online, even though a big part of those games are single player. Take Simcity for instance, a particular singleplayer game that most players do not want to play in multiplayer. On top of that the multiplayer functionalities, that were EA’s reason for always online, were not very well developed and few players liked the new features. The launch was also very troublesome because of unstable and insufficient servers and EA came back on their decision and released a patch that let players play Simcity offline as well, months later.

So why does EA want to do the same thing with Need for Speed, when they have failed in the past? Well because of money. If you have to connect to servers from EA to play, you cannot pirate the game since you can only play it through their servers. Meaning that they give piracy no chance. EA emphasized that social features are the main reason for always online, but bypassing piracy is probably their main concern.

I have a good internet connection and a Playstation Plus membership, so I have nothing against always online on that front. Now this sounds selfish – and it kind of is – but I believe that most players are in this situation. Call of Duty and Fifa are both immensely popular, because they have an online playmode. That is not the reason for me to sort of discard the arguments that people have given up until now against always online. No, I think a bad internet connection or the lack of a Plus/Gold membership are small problems compared to the problems I see with always online.

Let me take you back to the beginning of 2014. GameSpy, thirdparty software for online play, ceased their services. This meant that hundreds of games would lose their online features, including titles like Civilization IV, ARMA, and GTA IV. For the larger game titles a fix was found and players could continue to play their favourite games with friends online. However, for lots of games it actually meant the end of the online features it offered. The reason developers and publishers gave for neglecting the hole that GameSpy left, was that it was not financially viable to update these games.

Now this is a risk with all aspects of gaming that require something other than what is on your console or computer and of course those consoles and computers can break too. Computers and consoles can be repaired or replaced though and if you still have a disk, cartridge or something else that can contain games, you are able to play that game again. But if something like GameSpy stops working, you can only hope that the overlords decide to fix your favourite game. If they do not fix it; well its not the end of the world yet, as you can still play the singleplayer mode and experience at least a part of your game again.

Unless that games requires you to be always online and in a far away future those servers are taken offline. At that point you will not even be able to get into the main menu of a game you paid good money for. Not only that, games are lost forever. Even if they are classics and loved by every gamer that played it back in the day, the moment a publisher takes the servers offline it will be gone. No one can play that game ever again, unless a group of computer wizkids manage to bypass the ‘always online’ requirement.

But who would do such a thing? Who would take the decision to make games like Need for Speed Underground or Diablo II unplayable? Well no one, because they can’t. But with the new Need for Speed and Diablo III it is a very plausible. Ten years from now these games may become ‘not financially viable’ and taken offline. Or a publisher goes bankrupt and can no longer pay for the servers. Who is going to pay for them and maintain them when that happens? Well certainly not the bank, they are going to take those servers apart and sell them to be made into Icloud servers or something else that has nothing to do with gaming.

With always online, games will eventually become unplayable. Gamers that have awesome memories playing that game will not be able to revisit them. Players that have heard of a legendary game from fifteen years ago have no chance of experiencing that game, because it’s gone. Gamers, historians, people with common sense; must make as much noise on the internet about this always online crap as possible and make sure that the game industry knows that it is killing its own future history. Because there is nothing that will always be online forever.