Whatever happened to the days when you would buy a game, receive that lovely instruction booklet, and then put it in your system? I'm not familiar with any other platforms. GOG is a great example since they've started offering manuals on some of their DRM-free games again (which is fantastic). or Steam, which has services like cloud saving and large community features.

Essentially, these new online services are impossible to use without an internet connection! If your connection is lost or destroyed, you're out of luck. You've been screwed, pal! And don't get me started on the spying thing! I'm not sure how it works, but I believe the game emits data like "hey, this guy is playing game X!" to some random server. Publishers can monitor users and discover what games they play. That's why, probably, you see advertising for that one game all over the internet within a few minutes of playing it.

So, yeah, that's terrible because some of us genuinely do value our privacy. And don't get me started on geographical restrictions... We're given features that aren't delivered (like cloud saving) or services that are still glitchy as all hell (friends list), and we're justifiably upset. Or, for example, the promised cross-platform functions (cloud saves), which still do not function on different platforms.