If you want to know what the cost is for buying games from companies that control their platform this tightly, now you get to see it.

If it bothers you, you have one option. Cancel your xbox live subs. Ebay your xbox. Buy your games on a different platform.

They didn't even set out to screw you over and make the games you (thought you) paid for (largely) worthless. You just gave them so much power that they practically did it by accident.

The answer is the PC games model we already had, where the platform is open and the infrastructure isn't something you are forced to buy from a single seller you are locked to for life (xbox live).

Yeah, I know - what is one slashdot post going to do to stop the console juggernaut? Answer: nothing. But don't say I didn't warn you. Give a thought at least to patronizing developers who make and sell their games the old-fashioned way. Especially the ones who support open standards and open platforms like opengl and linux - there are a few.

Since when do you have to connect to Live to play your games offline?

Ever since Microsoft decided Xbox Live Marketplace content should only work offline when played on the particular console to which it was originally downloaded?

Not any more, see MW2 for example. Also, watch what happens when Steam shuts down.

Damn, I was all set to prove you wrong. It seemed like Doom came out well before 93....

From wiki:

Also there are less 12 year old shouting profanities at you (notice I only said less, you can only do so much!) and generally being asshats.

'fewer'

not only that, but you can play those games over a direct IP connection for free without involving battle.net. So when battle.net eventually does shut down or upgrades beyond compatability. You can still play those games with your friends. However this will not be true for starcraft 2.

Mid-December '93, to be precise, and ISTR that the full version started shipping in Jan '94.

I must have missed that. Sony is still advertising the Playstation Network as "100% Free" [playstation.com]. Where did they announce the change last week?

Well, yeah, if by that you mean once Eve Online's central servers go away, the entire game completely and absolutely stops, since the game can't exist in that case. After, say, Descent 3's central server lists went away, the game could still be played via informal means and direct IP address connections.

I used to be part of a community for a relatively obscure online game whose central server lists were long-abandoned by the parent company, but thanks to a registry hack and someone getting hold of the original metaserver code, not only is the game still playable via IP address connections, they now have a community-run central server list and the means to make more if need be.

Or, for instance, take FreeCiv (the standalone one, not the HTML5 experiment). That uses a central metaserver. All vanilla copies of the game come with that server as the default, but since the metaserver itself is open-source, anyone else could make their own and use it if the official ones suddenly went away, and the game makes it easy to input a new metaserver if you know where it is.

Outside of modding the XBox or hacking the games themselves, console owners generally don't have this option. And (most) MMOGs, like Eve Online, completely lose this functionality if their central servers (and thus where the persistent gameworld and content is stored) vanish.

You could play Doom over the Internet by 1995 via Kali [wikipedia.org] which allows IPX network games to work over TCP/IP. Apparently there were earlier precursors to Kali that also enabled Doom over the Internet. Nowadays you would probably just use a port like ZDoom which has Internet play built in.

xbox connect [xbconnect.com]

You are just being unreasonably pedantic. What I was illustrating was the difference between something decentralised and largely independant, and another thing that is completely in thrall of a large corporate entity and its whims.

And to answer your second point, google odamex, skulltag, zdaemon - all client server upgrades to the venerable Doom. I'm sure there are more since it is open source, but those are the ones I know. I grant you these open source upgrades were not available in 1993, but the internet didn't even exist in most peoples heads back then either, and in fact their very existance proves how allowing independant modification can preserve something indefinitely.