This has become SOP for Ubisoft and EA; but I believe you’re referring to Simcity by EA. That was the most egregious example with the most press and was zero-day cracked with a stub server interface.
But of course, on launch it was quickly discovered the game ran just fine without an internet connection. After 30 minutes, the game would complain the server would time out and shut down voluntarily. But all it took was patching the "30 minutes" magic number. Poof, problem solved.
Long story short, it is an ongoing problem that pirates receive a superior product. (A problem for publishers anyways, not one for pirates.)
Including the unofficial day-one patches that fix crashes on their computers and make the game actually possible to run.
Yep. Also, don't forget: an even bigger problem for legitimate users.
I think the charitable interpretation of EA's (fantastical) justification, was that they were planning to have some shared agent-based simulations being run in the cloud (one per "region" — where the whole point of the SC5 "regions" was that they were a sharding boundary for this shared simulation); where your updates to your city would be (asynchronously) incorporated into that shared agentive model; and then the interactions of the agents flowing through that shared model, would get reflected back into your city.
In other words, it wouldn't have been an O(N) computing-power thing, but more like O(N^0.5). Something that would greatly benefit from economies of scale, insofar as a region with 16 tenants wouldn't require much more computation than a region with a single tenant — and likely there'd be a per-region cap on the total number of agents to limit total simulation complexity.
Of course, this isn't what they did; but I think it's what they were claiming they did. Maybe it was even what their marketing department had been misled into thinking they had already done (or would do soon after launch day), because it was something their engineering department had tried to do, but just never got operational "yet".
OR it was something a product manager aimed to do, and it was sold internally before it was developed - and then proper resources were not available to make it a reality
Was it? No, I don't think so. I can imagine numerous computation problems that are not viable to solve client-side (i.e. your device "cannot run the simulation"), but are not a real burden on a server-side for a lot of users. Simpliest example: hosting a couple TB large rainbow table.
(Obviously, I'm not discussing that particular game, my objection is to the general claim only.)
Though the difference to something like Sim City is that everyone plays in the same shared game world even in "solo" mode.
Simcity was an excellent example of DRM providing no benefits and actively lowering the user's experience - that's almost always the case but it's rarely this extreme and obvious.
1. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/clogged-streets-simci...
Luckily we have better options now. cities skylines is a worthy successor to the original franchise and the (optional) dlcs only make the experience better.
Then again, once you've done it, now you can turn off your internet and play the game in peace, so it's not 100% only altruistic.
But that doesn’t comply with the „scene rules“, they always want a clean executable without any background services. I was always impressed by Razer1911 and CPY who obeyed these rules and did all this work just for clout.