Online games won't play unless at the latest patch level, for example.

Because the user is using the application during a 2-hour period of having no access to the Internet.

So your suggested workflow is just to let the user enter grossly invalid data for two hours then have the server present pages of error messages once a connection is reestablished.

Hence the growth of Node.

Input validation logic and any logic related to offline use needs to be the same (or at least provably identically behaving) on server and client.

I haven't played them. What do they add on top of the Alone in the Dark/Resident Evil/Silent Hill template?

I played that back when it was called "Gorilla.bas".

Apart from the fact that the whole concept of "console players" is an artifact of lockdown regimes, Pac-Man Vs. already did mobile vs. console.

Isn't that what "FMV games" on Sega CD and 3DO did?

Flappy Bird is a clone of Piou Piou, which is a clone of "Balloon Trip" in Balloon Fight, which is a clone of Joust. F*ck This Game is just WarioWare: each player in a split screen plays a one-button microgame.

They're also just Parappa with a plastic guitar.

Something like OnLive stops working so well once ISPs start charging per GB, at which point the end user has to pay both the ISP and the game publisher. What will the market bear? And I'm told such streaming fails for twitchier genres that rely on eye-blink reactions.

It'd work fine over Wi-Fi within a house. But how many megabytes per hour would it use over cellular?

An application can be separated into logic and presentation, or model and view, however your framework prefers to describe them. A program may require separate presentation for each platform, but versions of a program for multiple platforms should ideally share the logic. But some platforms strongly recommend or even require use of certain languages. How can a programmer follow the rule of not repeating yourself to share logic across languages? Say I developed a game in Java or Objective-C but I want to port it to a Microsoft platform that allows only C#. (In theory it allows any language that compiles to verifiably type-safe .NET Compact Framework bytecode, but in practice that means C#.) How would I go about making and maintaining that port so that fixes to defects in the logic of the version on the original platform propagate to the version on the Microsoft platform ?