> Games explicitly do not promise online features remain available perpetually. No reasonable consumer would assume perpetual access, either.

Explicitly through a contract you HAVE to sign AFTER the purchase. That's a big problem I have with this model. It's not made explicit until after the purchase.

And, it is reasonable to expect because, as I said and other old game players can attest to, this was the status quo for games ~15 years ago. This was a change in living memory.

> Firstly, it's patently incorrect, given Half Life has received 20+ updates in the last 5 years alone.

How about Quake 1/2/3? I pulled half life just as an example. Valve is making those updates because they want to, not because they have to.

> Secondly, it's technically incorrect, given Steam going offline prevents you from opening Half Life at all.

Ok, Again Quake or Dark forces 2. But also, it's only technically incorrect today. It wasn't when HL was originally released. Valve had to backport in it's integration to the valve servers. That is, they technically had to put in effort to make the game tie to their servers.

But also, I can still dust off my old HL cds, install it, and play it without the steam integration. I can even patch it to a pre-steam version and game with people that aren't using the pre steam version.

> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.

That's really only because steam has gone out of it's way to install DRM on top of the games. They have purposely broken my games to be dependent on their services.

None of this makes your argument better, in fact it's a highlight of the broken nature of the games industry.