Steam Forums are one of the worst hellholes I've seen on the modern internet, and Valve does nothing. Any game that gets declared a target by the post-Gamergate crowd ends up having its board seiged until it's unusable for any kind of actual discussion.
That's an answer for you as a consumer, but the article is from the perspective of the industry. If no one ever bought new games, game development would not be sustainable.
Active enough that I can queue at any time of day and find opponents close to my skill level with good ping
Active enough that I can queue at peak hours and find opponents
Need to schedule games via Discord matchmaking
If I really love the game enough, I'll put up with jumping through hoops to play it, but it does get frustrating when the games I like are a lot more convenient to play than the games I love.
The big thing about FF7 was that it came out during a critical transition period for the industry, and Squaresoft put the highest budget of any video game to date into making sure FF's jump to 3D graphics was as explosive as possible. The game was heavily marketed on its technical merits, boasting about how everything this game does could only be possible on PS1. It's full of setpiece moments that are literally just Squaresoft trying to show off their VFX budget (this is why summon cutscenes are so absurdly long). And it blew audiences away because no one had never seen anything like it before. FF7 was a revolution.
Trails certainly has good reason to be beloved by its niche fanbase, but by 2004, it really wasn't doing anything super unique compared to its contemporaries from the same time period. It's a polished game, but I can't describe it as anything more than an evolution.
This comparison really feels strained. FF7 was the PS1's biggest game, and by far. It was a revolution that shook the entire industry.
Trails is a cult classic that's beloved by a niche fanbase, and I'm happy to see this kind of game get a shot at wider recognition here, but its impact was in no way even remotely comparable to FF7.
It's not at all uncommon for games with an online component to have elements you need to play online to access. That's been a part of Pokemon since the series first added online play. Hell, even before that, Pokemon was conceived from the beginning to be a social game, built around the Game Boy's Link Cable if you want to see and do everything. It's never been exclusively singleplayer.
All I'm saying is that if you count online play as though it was part of a game's cost, you should be doing the same thing for games on other platforms too. You can't selectively pretend it only counts here.