This is exactly my take. I can’t in good conscious buy a Blizzard game right now, so I kind of wanted this to go through.
Every other part of me did not want this to go through. With how popular game pass is, and how many studios they’re buying, this is just a recipe for a bait and switch and a bad situation for gamers down the road.
I really dislike it, but it won’t stop me from buying a game. I was recently without internet and went to play a game on my Steam Deck and was surprised to find a game I had been playing required access.
What bugs me most about it is that it seems like everything these days is tilted towards the companies. If a game doesn’t require the internet, the only reason it’s there is to collect data on what you’re doing and maybe to help enforce DRM. It’s bad enough that I can only rent games from Steam (although bless Valve for making gaming on Linux so good), now I can’t even play the games I “own” if I don’t have a pipe back to the company? Ugh.
Guild Wars 2 for sure. It’s one of the games where I never turn the music off.
OK I love this analogy XD