[bdw5204]

The Gameboy didn't have access to the internet which meant you couldn't do most of the modern business models on it. The only way to make money off of a Gameboy game was to sell it in a store. It was impossible to patch it after it was released so you had to make sure all of the bugs were fixed instead of just shipping it unfinished and patching it later. There was no way to play a game off of a server and no way to track "hours of gameplay" or "player count" to optimize for addictiveness. Without an internet connected platform, these things were impossible.

[kibwen]

I yearn for an app permission of the form "can never access the network, period", and I don't just mean that it can't initiate or receive network requests, but also that it can't receive updates. In other words, once you install it, both you and (more importantly) the developer understand that the game is done. It's apparently unimaginable to people today, but this is how games worked for decades (and yes, every game that was worth its salt Just Worked, without major bugs).

[93po]

> but also that it can't receive updates

Manually blocking connections for computer apps or disallowing automatic updates on phones often leads to "you must update the software to continue using this" block. It happened constantly when I had an Android and didn't allow updates because I was effing tired of developers messing up something that worked perfectly as-is.