You’re not wrong at all. When Funcom introduced the new monetization – Battle Pass and Black Lotus Bazaar – this was one of the things a lot of us complained about.
If you play in offline mode, we can’t. But let’s see if we all understand what “offline mode” means:
Yeah, okay, looks like we don’t understand what “offline mode” means.
Funcom Live Services is not about official servers at all. You need access to FLS for private servers and co-op too. In fact, I’m pretty sure Dune will also use FLS, so it’s not even Conan-specific. If you want to know how Conan Exiles, FLS, and Steam work together, I wrote a silly, slightly simplified explanation in another thread.
The game will go into offline mode when it can’t validate your Steam user and/or cannot find the associated Funcom ID. This means that to go into offline mode, you need to either switch your Steam into offline mode or have no connection to Funcom Live Services. (Or, as it has been happening over the weekend, the connection between FLS and Steam has to fail.)
TL;DR: No, you won’t lose the money you spent on BP and BLB if Funcom decides to stop hosting official servers. You will lose it if they decide to discontinue FLS.
Of course they aren’t. The whole industry isn’t listening. Hell, we’re talking about more than just video games. Quick question: when was the last time you listened to music you downloaded onto your hard drive, without any connection to the Internet? Or watched a movie like that?
Sure, some services will still try to let you listen to your favorite music while you’re offline, because they know connectivity problems happen and they cache the songs on your hard drive, but they don’t let you actually download and back up the music. You don’t own anything digital.
Pardon my language, but it sucks donkey balls. And yet, here we are. Being fuсked by all digital content gatekeepers out there, and no change on the horizon.