It could last a very long time, though. It’s a privately owned company, so if they keep it that way, there’s no board to satisfy with big payouts and stock holders to appeas. There’s a lot less bullshit to deal with when you’re a private company.
Also, drm and online registering is way older than steam.
The best drm was back on floppy drives. You needed a piece of tape to cover the square hole so you could copy the game for your buddy. Lol.
There were some very elaborate copy-protection schemes. Like, “go to page 12 in the manual and enter the word at the bottom of the page”. Of course, people could just share what the word was, so some games did stuff like having a fucking codewheel in the manual, instead. So you had to take the code the game gave you, turn the wheel to the correct spot, and then enter the result the wheel gave you.
One of the most famous moments of Metal Gear Solid is an anti-piracy measure.
You talking about the radio frequency to contact Marrow? Not much for anti piracy, really. If you called Colonel Campbell three times total, her frequency was added to your saved frequency list.
Can you name a big single player game from before 2004 that required online DRM?
Because you originally couldn’t play single player HL2 without internet. They slowly backed off the DRM but it wasn’t like you needed to register once and could play forever. You needed Internet to play single player.
I don’t remember needing a constant internet connection to play hl2. I just remember needing it after the initial install. 20 years was a long time ago, so I don’t remember if it was the first single player game that had to be activated online first to run or not. I remember a lot of cd keys and ban type stuff for multi-player games pre hl2, but I don’t recall any single player ones.