Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 finally gets an offline mode, but only for the Steam Deck

pcgamer.com:

Three years after debuting for PC on the Epic Games Store, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2, a remastered bundle of the first two games in the long-running Tony Hawk series, finally made its way to Steam earlier this month. By and large it's been well received, but there's one persistent complaint: A lot of players would really like to see the always-online requirement dropped. Yesterday it finally happened, thanks to the 1.1 patch for Steam, but only partially—very oddly, the offline mode is only available on Steam Deck.

The 1.1 patch notes are very brief:

There was some hope that the Steam Deck offline option would also apply to the standard Steam release, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Multiple users on Reddit and Steam confirmed that THPS1+2 is now playable offline on the Steam Deck, but say it's still not playable offline on regular ol' PCs. 

I fired it up with Steam in offline mode to double check, and sure enough, it refused to run without a connection:

Even better, there was no way to exit the game from this «press enter to start/you must be connected» loop aside from a good ol' Alt-F4. 

That's weird, right? Why make an offline mode available for a portable platform but withhold it from desktop PCs? As far as I can tell there's nothing in the Steam Deck compatibility requirements that demands offline support, and while I can see where it might be handy if you are, for instance, Pro Skating on the bus without any connectivity, why limit that functionality to just the Steam Deck? Piracy is the most common justification for always-online requirements, but THPS1+2 has been out for three years now—I think it's fair to say that anyone who was going to pirate the game already has.

And sure, you're probably not going