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Sure, but it's not more valuable than $30 + regular price increases for 60+ years. That's what a lifetime membership is.

Lets flip that around: For my own finances $300 is a lot more valuable than $30 for 10 years. So if I'm to expect that the company will go out of business in 10 years or so, I would have been better off paying for the subscription.

Lets also not forget that companies don't take that $300 and responsibly invest it. It gets reinvested in a risky bid to grow the company and get enough people to subscribe in order to pay for your service going forward.

Lifetime services/updates are always a scam. The economics of this are really simple: Nebula is $30 per year or $300 lifetime. That lifetime membership covers only 10 years of subscription. So what's the plan after that? There's only really three outcomes:

• They stop providing you service
• They go bankrupt trying to provide you service
• They grow and stay big enough to be able to subsidize your service for your lifetime. I can't overstate how unlikely this is.

Buying a lifetime membership you're gambling that Nebula will grow big enough that other people's subscription will pay for your service. Your membership is a liability for them.

It's also bad from the other end. Lots of small software devs will sell lifetime updates but eventually need to abandon their products because they simply run out of money.

A service continually costs money to provide. You can't pay for that with a single payment. Lifetime services are simply incompatible with running a business long term. It's a bad idea and someone is always getting screwed.

Support for 2015 macs ended 7 months ago. Forget 10 years ago, my 2015 mac doesn't run like it used to in Big Sur.

Sounds like great fun! We did the same thing to play battlefield 2 over LAN (If you played on LAN you could bypass the online DRM, as we only had one copy).

Yea Halo Combat Evolved (Halo 1) only had internet multiplayer on the PC version, but the Xbox version could do peer-to-peer multiplayer. One person would have zero ping as the host and the rest would go over the vpn. Any kind of latency would have been annoying due to Halo CE's lack of lag compensation :D

Multinational chain? More likely that they're dumping to drive out local competition.

I also don't believe you, and here's why:

Halo CE didn't have lag compensation, so with 2 seconds of latency you would have to lead your target by 2 seconds. Shooting anyone who wasn't standing still would be a complete guessing game - I think you too would also classify that as unplayable (source).

Halo 2 seems to not be well documented - it looks like it's using some form of rudimentary rollback, which can deal with higher latency but you'd need it very stable to avoid opponents teleporting constantly. It's also unclear if it would handle 2s of latency, as that would increase both CPU and memory utilization of servers. If you're getting a variance of 700ms as you claimed this most certainly wouldn't be playable. High ping being stable is also hard to believe, naturally the higher the latency the higher the absolute variance.

Halo 3 uses synchronous lockstep networking with a ~300ms window (source). If you're not in that window your actions are rejected, so quite literally unplayable at 2s. I think this is more evidence that bungie would've had a <2s maximum latency in their earlier title.

My best guess is you've either misremembered the latency (130-200ms is about what I'd expect from rural internet at that time), or you were playing peer-to-peer with your friends and so internet latency didn't matter. I myself have played plenty of multiplayer games at over 100 ping and while it can be annoying I'd certainly call it playable, but not 10x that.