I thought many companies had weekly "chit-chat" meetings over video chat for just hanging around and doing nothing ? My place doesn't have it and we are not a place that welcomes or listens to any kind of ideas so they never cared about that.
"I really do hope game streaming and online-only single player games will stay as a niche."
Same here, I gave up on some AAA games because of this reason. I frequently return to old games. Some of them are from 1997,some of them are 2000,some of them are 2010's. Most of them have patches but if stadia and likes become mainstream, I don't know how its going to end up in 20 years.