This is nothing new, and publishers/developers have not learnt any lessons.
Some people will remember back when Half-Life 2/TF2 was released, it required a Steam account to be activated (which incidentally, coincided with the release of Steam platform). This caused a lot of displeasure from gamers who were used to just punching in the CD Key, installing the game, and away they went.
This was a hotly anticipated game at the time.
"What if servers are down? How do I play?", they asked.
"You can still play offline - it only requires a single log-in to activate", said Valve.
Of course, the day of release, the Steam servers were overloaded, and people who purchased the game were unable to activate it, and therefor play it.
I didn't get to play my new copy of HL2 for TWO DAYS because the servers were down.
#neverforget