At least in 2013 when I started using Steam more seriously if your connection dropped it would prompt you asking if you wanted to switch to offline mode. And I know this because I had Steam on a laptop that I carried in my bag hibernating and I didn’t had internet in some places I went to. So that has been fixed for over a decade.

But that is an apples to oranges comparison, just because you personally don’t care about those features doesn’t mean others don’t care either. For games without those features mentioned in the original comment (like Baldur’s Gate 3) not having join by IP is ridiculous we agree there. But for games that do it’s just not feasible, there’s too much of what makes the game the game in those features. Don’t get me wrong, I personally think that companies should not just kill the game and should provide ways to make their game playable offline after closing the servers, but it’s not as simple as allowing you to join by IP for the games being discussed here. What level would your character be? What load out would it have set? Which items would be unblocked? Etc, etc, etc, the servers that control all of that are too engrained into the fabric of the game, and that’s something that happened organically because people liked those features and wanted cross-progression, security, etc. Can all of that be removed? Sure but then you’re left with a shell of what the game is/was, still I believe companies should make such a release before closing the servers, but again this has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with direct join by IP.

You’re again mixing the point, your friends IP doesn’t have authentication, progress, chat, etc, etc, etc. You’re talking about a different kind of server.

This is the relevant bit of what you’re replying to:

I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?

None of that comes from the game-server but rather from the service-server. Even if social games that have those features allowed you to connect to a server directly, you would still need to connect to their servers for all of that stuff.

Direct IP connection has nothing to do with authentication and social flows (e.g. names and progress like the comment you’re replying to mentioned) and would not help in the slightest with it.

You’re mixing stuff up, the direct connect for multiplayer where you put the IP has nothing to do with authentication that he’s talking about. Whenever you open up a multiplayer game it will authenticate yourself with PSN using the account you have on the playstation, then if your authentication succeeded it will authenticate with the game service-servers which will reply with stuff like your progression in the game, whether someone has sent you a message or a friend request, etc. Modern games are a platform in and of themselves, essentially they have an entire Discord on steroids internally which you’re using before, during and after playing online matches. If the PSN is down you can’t authenticate with those servers… I mean, they could allow you to login using username and password, but that’s: 1 not needed since the PSN is almost never down and 2 probably against some TOS from Sony for you to release games on their platform. So if the PSN is down you would not be able to get into the main screen for multiplayer anyways, so there’s no place where you could input the IP for the game-server you want to connect to.

I’m not defending the system, but it is what it is, games have organically evolved to have all of these social features which people do use and like, it makes sense that Sony won’t allow you to go over them and authenticate directly with the game specific service-servers and it makes sense that if you’re relying on all of that for login you also rely on it for matchmaking (which is where the IP would come in place). Could it be better? Sure, but there’s no incentive for it to be, PSN is rarely down and games (at least large ones) take forever to be sunset, and by that time there are almost no people playing them anyways.

I don’t disagree completely, but it’s not as easy as you think. We’re not talking about server in the sense of a headless game client that will coordinate a match, we’re talking about a whole infrastructure of micro services and a web of communications and APIs just to get a basic authentication working. Not to mention possibly encrypted hard coded addresses to contact. That being said I 100% agree that before a game is abandoned a plan should be put in place to allow people to keep playing it, even if it’s complicated and cumbersome to setup, or even if it’s as crude as removing authentication entirely.