Why? You say they should have left it to the next project. That's ridiculous, they had the requirement from the beginning but temp disabled to benefit users and you think that should extend to years because? It's a live service game they wanted to support for years and years. Should SoT have left it out too until whenever Everwild releases if they had temporarily disabled ? I know you will say 'but it didn't happen that's on them' or something so let me give you another live service game. Minecraft launched without any requirements for account registration, went years without it. Then retroactively required all minecraft users to create a MS account. Should MS have left Minecraft alone "until the next project"? Do you not think that's asnine?
Minecraft was getting its Java version updated for years before they slowly phased out the updates. Minecraft didn't require MS accounts till the end of 2022, more than a
decade after the game came out. Plus you can make MS accounts, for free, in even more countries than those which support Steam.
This is pushing the mandatory requirement just 4 months into a new, popular, games's lifespan when it's at the peak of its recent popularity, and will prohibit people who have spent money from accessing the game.
Surely you can see the difference in these circumstances, right?
They sold it clearly stating it was a requirement from the place you bought it and on boot when you launched the game. It wasn't 'early messaging' it was messaging throughout these ~3 months. Anybody who bought it within that period or at any point had those messages there and hit skip.
If the publisher allowed the sale of a game everywhere knowing full well that they intend for it to stop working in 170+ countries after a few months, that's a really scummy move, then .
They should have asked Steam to put a regional sales restriction from day 1 to avoid this issue 3 months down the line.
