To be fair, while I would be unsurprised if some of these companies further capitalize on the "always on" feature to get info to sell, the real impetus behind it is the fear of pirates. By requiring an "always on" connection, they have built-in DRM because their servers can validate that they did, in fact, sell that game that's talking to them. This is not doable if you can play it offline.
It's greedy in the greedy algorithm sense; it's the easy step to take to minimize piracy. It ignores all the other effects, including bad will amongst the customers. It also is misguided; pirates can turn off "always online" code in games that don't, in truth, need to be online in order to work. I'm pretty sure you could find cracked Sim City games that don't need an internet connection, if you are willing to look for pirated things.
On the other hand, it's no simple "crack" to get an MMO to work "offline." If there were, we'd all already have our personal offline versions of CoH to play, since there's no law against modding software you own for personal use (to my knowledge, anyway).
It's more than just that. Always-on, DRM, DLC, and requiring games to be tied to service accounts is also about circumventing the right of first sale.
Game publishers (and big media in general) don't like the fact that you can sell your used games to EB or GameStop or whatever, who can turn around and sell them to someone else without the publisher seeing a penny of it.
Nevermind that's how it's always worked with physical goods. They want every sale to go directly into their pockets. So they tie services and online accounts to the game, so that people who buy it secondhand either can't use those services, or in extreme cases play the game at all. Bonus points if they write language prohibiting account transfers into the service agreement allowing them to ban all the 'dirty cheaters' who buy used gamesshare accounts.
In part, yes. But "right of first sale" gets very weird with electronic media.
100 years ago, if I bought a book, I could read it, and sell it to a used book store or to my friend or in a garage sale, and get money for it, and right of first sale said there was no problem with this.
But if I were to use my printing press (which, for argument's sake, I have - perhaps by virtue of being a publisher, professionally, myself) to print a copy of the book and sell
it, there would be legal issues. Same is true 30 years ago if I used a Xerox machine to make copies and sold them. Even if I gave all authorial credit to the author, my printings being sold by me are not legal invocations of the right of first sale. Not even if I just give them away for free on a street corner or to my friends. (Which, at least, would still be limited by the fact that I have to pay for the materials, somehow.)
Electronic media are trivially copied. It's so easy that people will copy it to their own already-owned hardware without worrying about it. There's no material cost that people have to shell out for each copy. (At least, not non-recoverable at the sole cost of getting rid of the copy.) Right of first sale absolutely SHOULD protect your ability to sell the box with the disks in it to Gamestop or to your next door neighbor or to give it to your best friend when you are done with it. But in the age of digital downloads, transferring it means making a copy and giving that away, unless you give away the hard drive onto which you put your paid-for copy, itself. Even if you have all the good intentions in the world, and delete the copy you have after transferring possession of the new copy to the new person, it's hard to prove you didn't keep a copy of your own.
Worse, copies of e-media tend to be, for all practical purposes, just as good as the original. There's no "well, I think I'll still buy the version put out by the publisher because this sheaf of papers in a binder is an awkward way to carry around and read this novel."
So a legitimate concern over anti-piracy DRM is not preventing right-of-first-sale transfers, but preventing illegal copying. It still isn't done well, most of the time, but it's not about denying right of first sale. Not uniquely, anyway.
Now, a more interesting question: Why is there such a huge market for selling used games to Gamestop at a fairly significant loss, when they put it back up for only $5-$10 less than it was "new?" The real problem that makes publishers of videogames wince at the right of first sale lies there: People who are willing to spend money to buy the box of their game will wait for it to go up at a used game store. The game seller sold the game once, while Gamestop will sell it 4-20 times before somebody finally keeps it.
That's at least 2-3 sales that the publisher didn't get because his customers paid Gamestop for it.
We don't see this problem with the book and movie industries. So, why not? Why do people keep a book or a movie forever, but trade in their video games as soon as they're done with them? If one could answer that question, one would be on the way to finding a solution to the publishers' problem that doesn't involve hating the right of first sale. (Personally, I think they could pull it off by dropping the box price by about $10 on initial release, or dropping it two weeks after initial release by $10, or something. Drop it at about the rate that it would find its way onto used game store shelves, and stay with that competitor.)
