It was all because of the paid horse armor in Oblivion. And the funny thing is, we tried to warn them what would happen if we took this lying down and the corpo bootlickers downplayed it and told us “don’t like it, don’t buy it”. As much backlash as Bethesda rightfully got for it, there was a big enough group of people who not only accepted it, but bought the horse armor. And so the very thing we warned them would happen did happen. All the DLC and microtransaction bullshit we’ve been getting for the past 20 years is because of the paid horse armor. I’ll always point to this very moment in time whenever people give me that “slippery slope is a logical fallacy” song and dance against shady microtransactions.

That’s also why people were rightfully upset about Konami selling save slots in Metal Gear Survive and rightfully pissed at the (shortsighted) people defending it online (yes, those people actually existed).

Just imagine what other companies could’ve started doing if we let them get away with that. $5 to use the jump button? $3 to load the options menu? $2.50 to reload your gun? $10 to join online matches? $8 to name your character? All very possible if we took that lying down like we did the horse armor. And no, I’m not embellishing. 

Without the Oblivion horse armor a different game would have tried to sell microtransactions (either cosmetic stuff or additional maps/mini-levels/characters).

Publishers would have tried that years before, but in older consoles online connections and online stores weren't ready yet, so they had to settle to sell additional stuff as bigger expansion packs on discs (or sell "special editions" of popular games on discs/modules; f.e. Need for Speed 1 S.E., Sonic & Knuckles).

The 7th console gen brought a new distribution method and online stores... of course all the publishers were very interested in selling mini-expansions for a small price. It is very naive to think that this additional source of revenue would have died if the Oblivion horse armor would have failed.

Back in the days where computer games were distributed on floppy discs, "mini expansions" were already a thing, f.e.

• Test Drive 2 Car Discs
• Wing Commander / Strike Commander mission discs
• additional golf courses to golf games

Forgive me but hahaha all the gamers crying they cant play their games becauze of the psn error/shutdown
Hahaha
BahabababHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Oh you didn't download that game you wanted to play and PSN is down? Damn, that sucks, I'm so sorry bro.

*picks up physical copy and go play it*

Should be only a minor annoyance for most solo players. You currently can't download and install game A for a few days?
How about the unfinished games B, C, D, E, F, G, H... which are already installed and aren't affected by the temporary PSN (or XBL, eShop, Steam, Epic, Ubisoft...) problems?

It is a much bigger problem for playing multiplayer games... but in this case, a physical disc doesn't help either; they are in the same boat as the digital peasants.

I dont see the need to harp on people that are digital only. I mean isnt that what we are annoyed at when other gamers tell us to "get with the times" and "physical doesnt matter" and laughing at our way of enjoying games? 

That reminds me...

Back in April 2011, we had that massive outage on PSN. I remember watching about it on TV, and they were talking to a dude who had just purchased a brand new physical copy of Mortal Kombat 9 for his Playstation 3. But he couldn't play it online, so he didn't even unboxed it!

I mean, the game surely had a lot of things to do offline. Man, I could never understand that!

Needing an internet connection to play single player games is one of the shittiest things the industry ever normalized.

So? A problem is still a problem. And that problem doesn't exist for physical games that don't require online checks or connection, which are the vast majority of games, it's only a problem that will grow for a digital only game system.

Let's also remember recently Sony made a change, without prior announcement, so digitally bought games not checked online after day 14 after the purchase, that reach day 30 after purchase, become unplayable, they won't open anymore until they are checked online. So it's an even bigger problem in the case of a long days period downtime like what happened in 2011.

Oh, and it's also an even, even bigger problem because of the insane price increase of storage we are currently living through, so an ever growing number of people are simply letting most games they aren't currently playing unisntalled because they simply lack space to keep them downloaded and don't want to pay 4x what that extra storage used to be 9 months ago, so the likelyhood of it happening to people just keep increasing when PSN is down these days.

But let's not talk about it when it happens, specially after the company responsible for the service announced to go taking away the option that would make said problem not a problem in the first place...

I get annoyed when people are fighting to lose their rights, which makes me lose mine together with them.