Sure, lots of people may have enjoyed those games, but publishers see the success of those games and they want a slice of the pie. Every time a WoW or Fortnite hits it big, you'll see a bunch of copycats. This is an industry that loves to chase trends, after all. And these "live services," be they  MMOs, "quasi-MMOs" (e.g., Destiny), or competitive multiplayer-only games (e.g., battle royales, MOBAs, and more traditional genres & subgenres), are the ideal avenue for big publishers to unleash all the awful bullshit upon gamers that we've seen this generation. These are games ripe for exploitation, of having a bunch of predatory, manipulative, and obtrusive post-launch monetization schemes crammed into them. It's got the likes of EA and Activision seeing massive dollar signs. And it's not good for the industry. There's only so many "live service" titles that the industry can reasonably support, yet too many companies want to shift resources away from traditional single-player titles just to try to cannibalize the market for these online-only social games.

Honestly, I'd argue that the only worthwhile things to come out of online are indies and the ability to patch titles after launch, though in regards to the latter most of the notable patches we've seen has dealt with online components of games, so even that one's questionable. I'd maybe also argue that expansions & DLC were a good thing that could breathe new life into older games, and is arguably better than what we had to deal with in the 90s with Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 3 (roster expansions meant buying the whole game all over again), but then again DLC mutated from something benign into the microtransaction/loot box filled miasma that permeates AAA gaming these days, so maybe we'd have been better off if DLC never existed to begin with.

Shadow1980 said:

Sorry for the late reply.

Like I said, I know a lot of people enjoy always-online games. However, not only do I disapprove of always-online games for a more fundamental reason—they are dependent on being able to connect to the game's servers, which will be shut down one day, as attested to by the piles of dead MMOs that litter the landscape of gaming history—but also the entire concept of always-online is inherently exploitable. There was inevitably going to be someone along the line who figured out how to further monetize games, even ones that do have offline components, once they could be connected to the internet, and it would have been a matter of time before it was taken to extremes. It's not just "live service" games like Destiny or Anthem or The Crew or The Division (games that could have easily been tweaked to where most of the game could be played offline). Even game series that worked fine without always-online have been affected. 343 Industries, much to my consternation, forced Halo 5's multiplayer half to be always-online, eliminating local co-op and LAN play, and they were pushing "loot boxes" two years before Battlefront 2 made headlines (fortunately, it seems they are reversing course on this at least partway for Halo Infinite, as local split screen play is returning).

If EA, Activision, and Ubisoft went under 20 years ago, whoever the major AAA third parties that would have existed in their stead would have gotten around to doing the same things at some point. Pervasive microtransactions and other predatory practices would still be a thing, maybe earlier, maybe later, but definitely at some point, because large corporations can't let potential new revenue streams go untapped. And mandatory online connections give them greater control over the product, at the expense of the gamer. And now game streaming threatens to make every game, even single-player ones, always-online by default. And some gamers are defending streaming and want it to be the norm. Sure, ideally always-online could potentially be a good thing, but good old-fashioned human nature tends to crush ideals under the bootheel of greed & avarice. Arguably, more bad than good has come from widespread online connectivity in video games.

Sure, you and a relative handful of other games might not be playing if it weren't for MMOs or other always-online games (of course, you could have just as easily ended up finding something else that would have rekindled your love of gaming), but I often think that overall it would have better for consumers if video games were never able to connect to the internet. It's hard to argue that the advent of online has been a net positive for gamers as a whole.