When This Generation is Over, Will D/L Games Still Work?

[CRTGAMER]

I was offline for a week recently and had an idea to check this out myself.
What I found was that im not DL shit from now on.I have over 200 games DL on my 360 and 10% of them worked while offline and even the ones that did work I can see some way or another of them yanking that too.
My original xbox games and 360 dl'ed games worked.
All indie games and mostly all arcade titles died when my system went offline.
I just deleted everything out of human emotion and realized I blew about a 1/2 grand.

This is a great way to verify your downloads.
Very smart, anyone can do this by temporarily shutting off their internet. This can give a real assessment of which games are not tethered to an online authentication connection for offline gaming. A question of which games will no longer work at all when the online support drops as a newer console comes out. Purchased DRM online backups will also go away as the current console becomes obsolete.


EDIT
I miss the days before the DRM Era
I just bought an older used game at the Thrift store for five bucks. PC Doom 3 CD version, which is also available as a Steam download purchase. During install of the CD, the serial number CD Key has to be entered, easily transposed from inside the jewel case. A funny prompt appeared next: "No one from either Activision or id will ever ask you for your CD-Key."

Those days are gone, now online authentification seems to be needed on most newer games.

[isiolia]

This is a great way to verify your downloads.
Very smart, anyone can do this by temporarily shutting off their internet. This can give a real assessment of which games are not tethered to an online authentication connection for offline gaming. A question of which games will no longer work at all when the online support drops as a newer console comes out. Purchased DRM online backups will also go away as the current console becomes obsolete.

It's a good way to verify what would break now. It's not necessarily what the result would be forever. Plenty of games, for example, have patched away the need to have the CD/DVD in the drive to play. The "universal unlock code" possibility does exist as well.

Realistically, most services these days associate a purchase with an account, not a device (read: services other than Nintendo's). While a subsequent machine might not be able to use software due to compatibility, there would remain the possibility of backwards compatibility.

EDIT
I miss the days before the DRM Era
I just bought an older used game at the Thrift store for five bucks. PC Doom 3 CD version, which is also available as a Steam download purchase. During install of the CD, the serial number CD Key has to be entered, easily transposed from inside the jewel case. A funny prompt appeared next: "No one from either Activision or id will ever ask you for your CD-Key."

Those days are gone, now online authentification seems to be needed on most newer games.

I'd take that as more of an anti-phishing warning, and technically Steam has similar disclaimers.