Marvel’s Avengers on PS4 requires “online activation” to play the single-player campaign. The latest Call of Duty pulled this same garbage and honestly this can absolutely fuck off. A lot of people will say “hurr all console games require day-1 patches anyway” but that’s a lie.

All single-player PS4 games allow you to just insert the disc, install the game and play with no internet connection. Companies trying to sneak this dogshit into console games can absolutely fuck off to the moon.

Forcing “one time activation” means forcing internet access, forcing PSN sign-up, forcing you to update to the latest game patch, forcing you to install the latest firmware on your PS4. This takes away so much of your freedom with regard to how you use your console with 1 move.

Remember how awful the PS3 firmware got in the end? They baked a fucking singstar ad into the UI that you have to scroll past every time you want to play a game. Imagine being forced to install the PS4 equivalent of that permanently onto your console just to “activate” a game.

There’s nothing “once-off” about it. It’s a permentant shit stain on the game preservation landscape.