Online services means multiplayer games won’t work anymore, but single player physical games won’t magically stop working just because the online services shut down.
Actually… I have a legitimate question here. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was broken on launch for the Wii U, and required a day one patch to play. It’s been stated that people who bought a game from the eShop will retain their ability to download it. But has it been clarified whether people who buy cartridges or discs secondhand will still have access to patches? (The fine article implies yes. So the obvious next question is, when will those capabilities be shut down?)
No, but some of the game's features will stop working. It's not a huge deal for Pokemon because it's primarily a singleplayer game, but that isn't the case for all games. Splatoon, for example, is a primarily online Wii U game that will no longer be playable at all after this shutdown (they had already shut down the servers for this game earlier this year due to a security issue, and took 5 whole months to fix it before bringing them back).
As time goes on, more and more games become reliant on online servers to function, more and more of their functionality is lost once those servers are shut down.
Also, if online functionality was available 50 years ago, the exact same problem would have hit Atari games. The technology just hadn't matured enough back then.
I expect the games I paid for to continue to be playable with the same features they had when I bought them, I don't care what the developer thinks or how many other people are playing it. If they don't want to host the servers anymore, they should give me a way to host my own. Plenty of multiplayer PC games released 2 decades ago can still be played online just fine today because the developers included the option to host your own games.
- Transferrable interminable software license (blockchain is a decent way to implement this but by no means the only one).
- Free dedicated server binaries for both game-servers and master-servers.
- Configurable server (or masterserver) connection within the client.
Old FPS 90s games actually hit pretty close to this. Binaries were easy to copy, dedicated server binaries were free and you could connect by IP, and realistically if you uninstalled first you could give somebody else the CD key and CD and it would probably work.
The only missing piece is that if the master/auth server went down the party was over.
Yes the security issues would make it unsafe to play with strangers, but the game would exist in an archival form that is no longer a thing for newer games.
