[Hamuko]

World of Warcraft is probably the murkiest example since you had to buy a copy of WoW to play the game, but the packaging clearly said how the box only includes a month of gameplay and you need to pay for any additional time after that. So it was never really advertised as a full and complete game, even though you had to buy it.

If World of Warcraft was just a subscription without having to buy the game, then I think it'd be a lot clearer. You pay $12 for a month of WoW and you get a month of WoW, nothing more, nothing less.

It's quite a lot different from a game like The Crew, which is sold as a complete game, even though it stopped working when Ubisoft axed the servers and was even retroactively removed from players' game libraries.

[nerdjon]

Thats why I started to feel like that no one had a good explanation of what exactly they are going for here. The person I was discussing with seemed to imply the information they were presenting was from youtube videos.

My impression was that they were somehow trying to argue that there being a subscription is the only way that a consumer can understand it is an online only game. But, yeah you still have to buy the expansions and the base game (sometimes). Same with FF14 and other MMO's.

This just felt like a arbitrary designed exception that has no basis on technology. The difference between WoW and FF14 and games like GW2, Destiny, and other similar games is minimal at best from that side of things. Obviously not he same code and not designed the same way, but still systems meant to handle similar large scale things.

I just don't understand how you can argue that a consumer understands that with a subscription but if they pick up an online only game like GW2 or Destiny that they somehow don't understand that?

Regarding The Crew. I honestly still don't understand what the situation with that game was since I never played it. Was it a truly online game that required interactions with a server (not phoning home) to fundamentally work and interactions with other players to fundamentally work. Or is it like Forza where the online component was a layer on top of a single player game.

That distinction is important and are very different discussions about the impact and realities of something like this.