I don't think the need to be connected to the internet is the same as DRM
You are factually incorrect here.
DRM, digital rights management, is any post-sale control on the use of digital media/content.
If I install FF on a machine without internet access, I cannot access web pages, I cannot look at the latest stock prices, news, check my email etc.
Firefox can access web pages that are stored offline. Obviously, it cannot access data stored somewhere you do not have a connection to, but Mozilla isn't responsible for your connection.
Frontier Developments is wholly responsible for the authentication/save servers Elite Dangerous tries to connect to and the information stored on them. This connection and this data are required to play the game, and this is the form of DRM they have chosen to control access.
My understanding is that ED can be installed on any machine, but you are only allowed one connection per user to FD's servers for stock prices, news, messages, match making. If you don't have an internet connection then you can't access that information and the software doesn't work because of a lack of that information, not because DRM.
Not including a local source of this information is a form of DRM in and of itself. Frontier Developments has deliberately separated the game client from the game hosts/storage to retain control of how content is used. This is what DRM is.
I suppose FD could make this really beyond doubt by making the tutorials available without an internet connection. Then there would be no question over the DRM.
The game would be obviously, and factually, limited by DRM if
any single player content remained inaccessible without the need to connect to Frontier servers.
There is no reason beyond the desire for control, that the entire game, minus the content intrinsically dependent on other players, not be available off-line. There is no reason, beyond the desire for control, that other players could not connect to a host of their choice, rather than Frontier's official servers.
Any implementation of this control on digital media is DRM, by definition.
I agree with you, it isn't DRM, it needs to connect to the servers to actually work.
You do not know what DRM is.
I'm amazed that all the vocalists can complain about lack of offline mode on an online forum.
I assure you, I am equally amazed that you can confuse my desire to participate in an on-line discussion with my desire to control how I use a completely different product which I have paid for.
I wish people would just take the time to find out what something is, and what it isn't, before throwing terms around. It's not DRM. Why you may ask....
This is why
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
Google for god's sake.
Go back and read the article you've linked to, and try to comprehend it this time.
Anyway, how can you be so sure this is the only thing that's going on across ED's entire server infrastructure? In fact, how are you even sure that the front-end boxes we see are the only servers in use? For all we know there could be half a dozen very big number crunchers behind the front-end. Has FD given us info on their exact infrastructure?
It's quite easy to look at what is being sent to and from one's system.
The background simulation could quite easily swamp a PC (just think of the volume of work and the fact that most graph algorithms tend to be expensive). Most gaming PCs are better on a thread-by-thread basis compared to servers, but you don't often find 256 threads of execution on a PC. Simulation problems like this one are great for massively parallel architectures, and PCs can't do this stuff and push vectors to the GPU at the same time.
My point is: we're all speculating.
No, we are not speculating.
In online-Solo play the amount of data that is being sent back and forth between my system and any ED related server is miniscule. It took more bandwith to run a Doom 2 server for a single person on my LAN in 1994.
There is no significant background simulation going on, and there is no reason why the server could not be run locally, in tandem with the client, with trivial levels of overhead.
Even when the "background simulation" is complete, it is something that could easily be emulated, again with trivial difficulty/overhead. We know this because other titles have been doing it for decades, including some of this game's predecessors.
About the DRM: the way I always understood the DRM-free media offer was that the actual physical media would be free of DRM so they can be copied and backed up. I never understood that to mean that I could run my own server and/or play entirely offline.
Then your understanding was incomplete. Lack of DRM implies far more than a lack of copy protection on client-side media.
