Enlarge / More and more these days, your ability to play new games depends on the quality of your Internet connection. (credit: Sean MacEntee / Flickr )
For many players these days, the video game industry’s increasing reliance on online connections is an afterthought. But for the significant portion of the world without the quality Internet connection, it can sometimes feel like the game industry at large is leaving them behind.
Pointing out the frustration of large day-one updates has been a feature of the gaming industry for more than a decade now. The topic perhaps reached its global breakthrough with the November 13 announcement that the Xbox One would require a day-one update to function . More recently, the Xbox Series X requires a one-time online check-in before some disc-based games will work.
Both Sony and Microsoft also introduced disc-drive-free options for their latest consoles , perhaps presaging the day when those drives are gone from consoles for good. And that’s not even mentioning the many multiplayer games that require a new strong online connection for some sort of reasonable play experience or the offline games that require not only day-one updates, but sometimes months of patching and downloadable fixes before they begin to resemble the product which consumers had hoped for.
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