I've been able to log into Steam's offline mode numerous times when my internet was unavailable for long stretches of time without logging off explicitly to offline mode.
See, the problem is, our complacence has made this the acceptable norm when it shouldn't be.
An excerpt from a report about Sony's consideration of Always-on:
This is just as true for people (regardless of their country's internet capabilities) and not just countries.“Did we consider it? No, we didn’t consider it," said Yoshida. "The main reason being that many countries don’t have robust Internet connections. It makes sense for people to have Internet connections to play online games, but for offline games there are many countries that we saw [that] do not really have robust Internet.”





