While this could technically work to keep games playable, for a lot of games where the point was to play it online (not games that were forced to be online for arbitrary reasons like Sim City) then it doesn’t make much sense to do. If I had an offline version of Overwatch 1 then yeah I could still look at the characters, skins, and do practice, but that’s not really the point of the game. Games like OW1 are part of the reason people are calling for being able to set up their own community servers so the game could still be playable by dedicated fans without requiring the developers to support it forever.
Or just release an offline patch so the game can be still playable?
While this could technically work to keep games playable, for a lot of games where the point was to play it online (not games that were forced to be online for arbitrary reasons like Sim City) then it doesn’t make much sense to do. If I had an offline version of Overwatch 1 then yeah I could still look at the characters, skins, and do practice, but that’s not really the point of the game. Games like OW1 are part of the reason people are calling for being able to set up their own community servers so the game could still be playable by dedicated fans without requiring the developers to support it forever.