Popular video games such as Diablo III, Super Mario Run, and Starcraft 2 employ always-on DRM by requiring players to connect to the internet to play, even in single-player mode.
[10] Ubisoft's first titles requiring an always-on connection were Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic and Assassin's Creed II, of which the former had reportedly been cracked as of the first day of the game's release.
Sony Interactive Entertainment and Polyphony Digital were later criticized for making their latest title, Gran Turismo 7, require constant internet connection in order for players to be able to save their progress.
The series creator Kazunori Yamauchi explains that this decision was made to prevent hacking and cheating, with only Arcade Mode being fully playable offline.
Square Enix clarified that there would be no fix for it as the game was "a constantly, evolving, living world of assassination that will grow alongside the community with frequent content updates in between the launch of each location.
Square Enix later received criticism for implementing always-on DRM on the remastered version of Final Fantasy X/X-2 in 2019, over two years after the game launched.
The 2016 reboot of Doom was also later criticized of requiring to be always-online in order to use the Vulkan API recently implemented in the game in an update, although it can still run offline with the OpenGL executable.
Denuvo was also immensely criticized of using a similar method, and many tech reviewers had problems benchmarking Denuvo-implemented games like Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
As of October 2015, always-online games with single player modes that now have had dead servers for six months and longer are now exempt from DMCA prohibitions on circumventing copyright protection.
[23][24][25] In late September 2021, Sony released a firmware update for the PS4 that resolved the issue, so that only time-stamping of Trophies would be disabled if no accurate date and time can be obtained from PSN.
Efforts to revive EA Phenomic’s BattleForge (which reached end-of-life in 2013[33]) with a custom server bore fruit as early as 2017,[34] with full functionality to the game restored in 2021.