Elite Dangerous has a multiplayer mode, but also a single player mode. Single player is single player, there's no reason to be connected, other than to make sure the player has not done something naughty with their copy.
>No, you're missing my point entirely, which is that there's a maintenance cost to perpetuity. It's just placed somewhere else in this case.
And what you're missing is that "perpetuity" is a lie. In practice most online games don't even to ten years before the developers shut their servers down permanently. If you really love Elite and you think it's the best game ever, you can take measures to continue playing it today, 38 years after it came out. Do you think Elite Dangerous will continue being profitable for another 30 years?
> And what you're missing is that "perpetuity" is a lie.
You are now actively misrepresenting my point, which was that someone is going to have to reverse engineer something in order to maintain software. Disks don't last forever. They rot. Your copy of whatever in your PS2 for 30 years will potentially not come out unscathed. Other media has its own issues. PC games from that era simultaneously are getting harder to run and have their own DRMs that need removed.
Emulators are the only future-proof solution and they will undoubtedly need to be ported to new architectures in the future. The maintenance cost is somewhere. In this case, it's in removing ore reverse engineering the online-only components. You don't even have to reverse engineer everything - just enough to get it running. Look at Teknoparrot. Multiple games only barely work because they don't emulate the entire multiplayer backend.
This isn't an insurmountable task and you weren't about to be the one writing a PS2 emulator, so I'm not sure why you're so insistent that it's different. For you, anyways.
Yes, all physical objects degrade with time. Different pieces of software can change in incompatible ways. This is all well-known. That doesn't change the fact that if the only way your property can stop functioning is if it breaks down at the software or hardware level, it will likely continue working for a longer time than if it additionally needs someone else to continue powering a server somewhere.
>No, you're missing my point entirely, which is that there's a maintenance cost to perpetuity. It's just placed somewhere else in this case.
And what you're missing is that "perpetuity" is a lie. In practice most online games don't even to ten years before the developers shut their servers down permanently. If you really love Elite and you think it's the best game ever, you can take measures to continue playing it today, 38 years after it came out. Do you think Elite Dangerous will continue being profitable for another 30 years?