@fuzzyfungus wrote:
From a business perspective, no, they usually have an incentive to try to draw you in, and they certainly don't want to mess with somebody who has already plunked down the plastic and become a nice recurring revenue stream.
However, technologically, they don't actually have much choice: genuinely 'cloud' systems are fault-intolerant because they depend on the client's system, your servers, and everything in between working correctly and DRM systems for client software (which is most of the 'creative cloud' package) basically have to be built to 'fail closed', because they would otherwise be pitifully weak. If the default assumption, when the auth server is unavailable, were "Eh, I'm sure it's just an innocent mistake, and the user seems like a good sort of guy.", all you'd have to do to 'crack' the DRM would be add a couple of firewall rules. Hilariously simple. So, if you want it to actually work, you fail closed, with varying degrees of strictness.
Adobe isn't very competent, and hell hath no fury like somebody missing deadlines because you screwed up; but they are actually on the comparatively lenient side (probably because they were willing to accept some piracy in the hope of preventing exactly this sort of damaging embarrassment). The people who are really concerned about pirates, and less about paying customers (like EA), have already experimented with demanding continuous connectivity even for single-player.
Even the nastiest DRM vendor doesn't want mistakes like this to happen, since they are bad for business; but architectural imperatives don't leave them much choice: if you want control, the system must be artificially brittle, because if it weren't cutting out the artificial points of failure would be a trivial exercise.