There are a lot of reasons why a company would build a solo game that can't function when it's disconnected. But the simplest one is just that programming is expensive, and nobody is going to pay developers for the extra time it takes to make sure the game still works after the company is done supporting it. If a game has any online features like leaderboards, in-app-purchaes, banner ads, etc, then it gets a lot more expensive to make sure it all still works when those services are offline, especially considering that the only time they should be offline for any amount of time is after the game is discontinued. Most companies will decide to stop testing that scenario completely and just let the game break when they shut down the servers. But other companies will put in an explicit kill switch to shut down the entire game, which is a relatively cheap way of limiting how much you have to deal with the aftermath of pulling the plug.

It's not great for the end user, and Tetris was an extreme case where a paid version stopped working (not just the ad-supported version)... but I don't see how we can expect anything more from game developers these days.

The lesson is don't play connected games if you want them to work forever, I guess.

Google may do some things that should worry us, but to me this doesn't qualify as even a little bit evil.

I don't see any problem with using the address bar in this way. You already type the search there, and the browser forwards it to your preferred search engine. Just about every browser already does this. So why is it so crazy to keep the original search text where you originally typed it? It seems like a cleaner UX to me. People can be pretty dumb, but I don't think anybody who would be thrown off by this change would know how to interpret or even copy/paste the original URL anyway... it's just arcane gibberish to them, so you might as well keep their search text in the address bar. Everybody else can opt in or out of the change.

It's not that amazing, but it's still sad. Most mobile games nowadays have things like leaderboards, in-app purchases, etc... and banner ads of course... and it's very unlikely that the developers were given extra time to build the game so that the single-player mode still worked after the game stopped being profitable enough for the company to keep those services alive.

I'd say if you are targeting a very specific platform, developers don't really need full admin access to do their jobs. e.g. ASP.NET development is fairly rigid and it's usually done with the whole team using the same exact tools (Visual Studio, TFS, etc). In such a regimented environment, it might be better to lock everything down. But in an agency or consultancy shop, the tool set could change with every project. I don't think IT should be on the hook for setting up random systems that will only be used for a few months or weeks before being torn down again.