The Reality of Always-Online Gaming

I did it. I finally got myself an Xbox One. It was the only 8^th Generation console I was missing. Now I feel complete. Now I can join my fellow Digital Crack colleagues on all multiplayer binges, regardless of platform. Life is good.

My console space is limited, though. I currently own 22 consoles, including my Xbone, and things are tight on my stands. For the time being, before I finally get my custom shelving unit built, I had to cram this bad boy in somewhere. Coincidentally, it now sits below its dad, the Xbox 360, the console who, after an 11-year run peppered with successes and failures, is no longer being manufactured by Microsoft. One shelf down is the progenitor of the bloodline, the original Xbox, a console that served me and my son quite well.

Xbox Live began on the original fat Xbox on November 15, 2002. It was a service unlike anything ever seen in the gaming space. It was truly a revolution in online gaming; for the first time, there would be a persistent online storefront and matchmaking service for console gamers wishing to play online, across multiple games. It would grow and evolve on the Xbox 360 and spawn a rival service, Sony’s Playstation Network (PSN). Millions of gamers would come to regard these services as essential to the online console gaming experience.

Xbox Live was discontinued for the original Xbox on April 15, 2010. That console is now somewhat crippled, unable to play some games to their fullest potential. As I fired up my Xbox One and thought about the end of the 360’s manufacturing run, the one question that kept popping up in my head was, “how long before these machines are unplugged from Xbox Live?”

For many gamers, Xbox Live, PSN, and the PC equivalent Steam simplify many online tasks. Want to find friends to play a certain game? Look at your friends list and pick some. Want to play a certain game at launch? Pre-order it online and it’ll be pre-downloaded and ready to play on Day One. Don’t want to pre-order? The game, and all of the games released that day, is ready to be selected and purchased immediately. Your game has been updated? No worries, they’ll let you know and let you update it at your leisure. These services reduce what used to take hours of work and reduce it to an instant.

These services, however, remove all real control from a gamer’s hands. When you search for games on one of their storefronts, you are searching through the games THEY want you to buy from them in that moment. Doesn’t seem like a big deal? Well, let me take you through a few actual occurrences:

• On June 25, 2013, Activision’s Deadpool became available for purchase on PSN, Xbox Live, and Steam, to coincide with its physical release. On December 31 of that year, that title and other Marvel-licensed titles were no longer available for purchase on those networks. Why? Activision’s license with Marvel had expired and they no longer had the ability to sell Marvel-based titles. You could go buy the game at GameStop, but not on Xbox Live or PSN. The license was subsequently renewed in January 2015, just in time for the Deadpool movie.

• On August 12, 2014, the cryptic title P.T. was made available for download on PSN for the Playstation 4. The title, a cleverly veiled playable teaser for the planned Silent Hills game by Konami, subsequently enthralled gamers worldwide. On April 29, 2015, while in the midst of an internal scrubbing of the game’s creator, Hideo Kojima, Konami decided to remove P.T. from PSN and prevent anyone from downloading it, even if they had downloaded it previously.

• On April 7, 2016, Steam announced its initiative to bring its platform into the “present”. This summer, Steam will require Windows 10 to play games via its platform. If you own any games that are not compliant with Windows 10, they will be disabled in your library and delisted from the PC storefront. If you are running a Windows OS older than 10, you may not be able to play Steam games AT ALL!

You can walk into any retail store, or peruse any second-hand marketplace like eBay, at any time to find physical games on older platforms. These games will play on their respective consoles regardless of outside issues. If Marvel decides it doesn’t like Activision anymore, or if Konami starts going through change-of-life and doesn’t like certain people anymore, that does not affect the physical copy. You can play the game and ignore all the drama. Your power as a consumer is maintained.

When a gaming platform decides what games you can and cannot play, your power as a consumer dries up quickly. If Sony or Microsoft of Valve decides they don’t like the developer or the publisher anymore, the money you paid for any digitally downloaded games does not factor into their decision. They must ALLOW you to play a game, whether you paid for it or not. Think about that as you peruse the games you bought via Steam, or Xbox Live, or PSN. How many of those games will you be able to play a year from now? How many of those games will you miss when the platforms decide you can’t play them anymore? How many of those games are even available physically if you want an offline option?

Better yet, what if your gaming platform itself goes dark? What if you turned on your console and came to the realization that all your games, your saves, your friends, your ENTIRE online presence on it was no more? You don’t think it will happen? Ask the Noble 14, the last 14 gamers who fought the closure of Xbox Live 1.0 on the original Xbox by keeping their sessions on Halo 2 running, keeping the online service running a month longer than originally planned. Ask the many people clogging Reddit and GameFAQs, asking about rumors of the 360 getting unplugged soon. Ask yourself if that can be your service one day.

On May 10, 2010, just a bit before 2:00 am EDT, Apache N4SIR, the last of the Noble 14, was booted off of Halo 2. Xbox Live 1.0 died with that lost connection. Sooner, rather than later, it will happen for the Xbox 360. On March 31, 2016, 14 years after its debut, Final Fantasy 11’s servers for the Playstation 2 were shut down; with it, online support was killed for the PS2.  If the rumors are true, Sony will kill PSN on the PS3 sometime in 2016. When will it happen? Will it happen at all?

What if all these rumors come to fruition? What if the PS3 and 360 get severed from their respective collectives? Will you relish the chance to be one of the next Noble 14? Or will you look at your console, with all the digital games you purchased on it, many without a physical equivalent, and mutter a litany of curse words instead?

I thoroughly enjoy my new Xbox One. I just wonder if the Xbox 360 games I loaded up on it will survive when Microsoft cuts the cord on the 360. Afterward, I will wonder when the Xbox One will join its forebears in the digital abyss.