Always online?

Imagine a world where ever aspect of your life is connected. Your fridge tells your oven what it has inside so it can pull meal ideas you could prepare from the net and pre heat itself to the right temp.

Or your car knows when your up in the morning and adjusts its internal temp and plans a route to work avoiding traffic jams and delays.

All that sounds great until the servers go down. All of a sudden your fridge forgets what in it and the oven stays cold and you get home from work with the expected meal still on the shelves at Tesco.

You wake up and the car has not down loaded the new firmware, the screen is icy, you finally get on the road only to find the M25 is Jammed to hell and your late to work.

Always online sounds really good for games to, you can meet friends in game, have a never ending supply of intelligent enemies or tem mates to compleat with, so much better than AI bots.

But once again, what if the service fails? 

PC gamers have experienced this allot in the last decade, Sim city 4 had server errors from day one, this meant hundreds of gamers could not play the game for hours on end. Diablo 3 suffered from the I dreaded "error 37" server busy message- the pop up that spawned a thousand mems as gamers lashed out on forums and blogs after finding that you could not even play the game offline.

And there in lies the problem, if you can't play a game like Diablo 3 offline then what happens when blizzard stops the online support? Some companies are good enough to release patches that allow offline gaming when the servers are taken offline, but not all.

What if you live and work in areas where high speed internet is a luxury? I spent time working in areas of Saudi where I could not get wifi for days at a time, this lead to me lossing access to many games that i had purchased expressly to entertain myself in my work down time.

Retro games at the moment are reach a stage where add ons, characters and even whole levels are missing as the servers have long since shutdown- I recently played guitaro man on the dreamcast only to find i could not play the last level as a download was needed, and if i want to play halo 2 i online i have to pay microsoft a second time for the privilege as xbox live does not let you play the original anymore.

With all the dlc games demand we pay for and download, in ten years time will you be constantly bothered by Arkham city demanding you download the catwoman pack that is no longer avalible? You can bet if you want said items or even to play todays gamesyou will have to buy the 4K full VR remake :(