> There's also the question of preserving gaming history. As we saw with THQ last month, publishers aren't immortal. They can die, and had THQ implemented always-online DRM in Darksiders II, all copies of that game might've died with it when the rights to the series weren't bought up by another publisher.
That's the part that concerns me the most. I still install (and play) lots of old games on every computer I own -- King's Quest VI, C&C: Red Alert, Worms: Armageddon, etc. And who could live without the console classics like Goldeneye or Ocarina of Time? All you have to do is pull out the disc (or cartridge), pop it in, and play.
We still don't know exactly what will happen with this new generation of games that consumers are merely "renting" from companies like EA, but piracy seems to be our only guaranteed method of preserving them. What happens if you want to play Battlefield 3 again 10 years from now? You might be able to access it IFF:
1. Your account is still in good standing (not banned)
2. EA still exists
3. EA has decided to maintain support for Origin
4. EA has decided to maintain support for Battlefield 3
5. You remember your PW or can prove to EA you're the account owner
There's not much history to base this speculation on yet, but what little we do have shows that that's an extremely unlikely scenario. If there's any chance to preserve the games we're playing now, it's probably up to us to make it happen.
I think the real mismatch for EA and Gamers is that EA is effectively selling a SaaS product but pricing it like it's an boxed product.
It's not just unlikely but, in fact, impossible for the operating costs of the servers to be worth keeping on forever since no (significant) additional income will be coming in from the title after some point X.
SaaS companies have been dealing with this for years quite successfully via their "pay as you go" monthly subscriptions. This keeps the money flowing in and motivation to keep the servers on. And, better yet, it gives the consumer confidence that the service provider is going to pay attention to the product long-term, not just during launch day.
My recommendation for EA moving forward would be to move to subscription pricing for any games that operate as online-only - single- or multi-player.
Exact pricing is important as well. My initial instinct was to say that they should prorate the cost, something like $5/month but I quickly realized why this wouldn't work. Obviously most gamers are fickle and have short attention spans. 90% of buyers probably wouldn't buy month two and it wouldn't work out.
Instead, I would recommend pricing the game at something like $60 for two years. Same price and clearer value to me as a customer. Suddenly I'm not worried if they are going to shut off the servers in four years because that's not what I'm paying for today (and really never was). I'm paying for the opportunity to play this week and, if I love it, play it over and over again for two full years. Is that worth $60? Absolutely! And what about in two years? If I'm still loving it, hopefully they let me renew for another two years, maybe even at a discount. And if the game ends up sucking and nobody renews, they can turn the servers off (or throttle them down) without feeling bad.
The real risk with the current system isn't in case the game is a flop and they turn the servers off prematurely. It's actually if the game is legendary, like SimCities of past, and the passion to play keeps momentum for decades. How can EA keep the lights on?
This is truly delusional. Your model assumes that the current model, (buy once own forever), isn't making them enough money to keep the lights on.
The issue here isn't that EA is not making enough to keep the lights on. It's that EA wants to make more, and more, and more and more, and more... And is too lazy to figure out a true solution to piracy.
Nobody will pay $60 to "rent" something for 2 years. You already pay $60 to own for life.
If it were some insane price like $10, then yes. That makes a whole bunch of sense. It's the model that Netflix, Spotify, and the iTunes Store subscribes to. Saas will only work if it provides value at an extremely minimal price.
What happened with Sim City is not a failure of the Netflix, Spotify, iTunes store model. It's just that EA, as a company, is just simply blinded with so much greed to understand the way the world works today.
So they juuuust squeaked back into profitability last year; probably mainly due to the slowly improving economy (games are luxury items and folks are only now cringing less when they spend on them).
It's hard to know yet whether this ugly launch was actually a bad move for them; dollars don't lie and they appear to be paying enough to get some heavyweight execs.
> So they juuuust squeaked back into profitability last year; probably mainly due to the slowly improving economy (games are luxury items ...
The jury is still out on how the economy affects video games.
It's often argued that video games perform similarly in recessions to the 'sin industries' - alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, etc. Some quick googling found plenty of articles about whether the video game industry is 'recession proof', but nothing I found unequivocal enough to cite.
>"Instead, I would recommend pricing the game at something like $60 for two years. "
While I personally understand all the costs involved and would perhaps be willing to do this (kinda like the WoW model where the game had an up-front cost plus recurring service fees), I think many would feel scammed by this model.
My question is: what is wrong with the model where single-player is totally offline, but multiplayer requires a matchmaking server that DOES validate the license? This model is already out there and works well enough (though it is 2013 and we could /probably/ figure out how to make open directory server software and/or employ P2P tech to lessen the financial burden AND increase reliability / stability / community relations...).
The bigger issue here is that American companies are trying to move us to a subscription model for /everything/, so we're always in debt and most will never truly own anything of significant value. Lease your housing, your car, your computing, your gaming, your textbooks, your cellphone, your couch, your money, etc.
It's an economic consideration, by allowing offline play they believe they'll be leaving more money on the table than if they make it online only. They'll convert people who would have just got a cracked version into buying it.
Unfortunately for Maxis they obviously didn't hire any programmers who had a clue how to write scalable server code.
And the result is that they have managed to lose a lot of sales in the first few key weeks because of bad reviews.
But economically speaking, sound decision, just poorly executed.
On your last point, this is an unfortunate side effect of digital goods. In Europe we can hope for a growing political movement that this is deeply anti-consumer and will be legislated against, far more likely here than in America, but it will be hard for courts to decide where to draw a line. So ultimately I doubt it will ever happen.
> But economically speaking, sound decision, just poorly executed.
I'm not sure it counts as a 'sound decision' if you take a very risky option that hasn't panned out well for competitors in the same market on the premise that if you beat the odds, you'll get a bit more money.
I think EA underestimated the cost of their "always on" DRM, and didn't adequately assess the risk against the payoff - and now have taken a business hit from it.
For example, literally no one I know that I used to play Sim City with for hundreds of hours as a kid purchased this game - precisely because of EAs decisions regarding always on DRM and their history with Spore design. They've effectively driven away over a dozen people in their 20s, perfectly willing to fork over $70-100 on a game they like. (Or $200 or $300 or $1000 on a really good game they like; I'm looking at you table-top guide books, trading card games, and minifigures.)
I consider that exactly the opposite of 'sound decisions'.
tl;dr: You have to assess the risk that you're going to poorly execute your choice to make a 'sound decision'; I'm not sure EA did.
If you have to pay a monthly fee, why should you have to pay upfront? That doesn't make any sense. If the monthly fee gives access to the game, then the client should be freely downloadable with a monthly access fee to play the game. If you pay up-front, then you should be able to use it without requiring any additional payments.
I may have failed to clearly communicate my point. My intention was that they could do a lot more to manage expectations of their customers which would, most likely, greatly reduce the ill will they are currently experiencing.
but piracy seems to be our only guaranteed method of preserving them
You aren't going to pirate Sim City 5.
This is the future of gaming. Companies are just going to avoid all the grief of piracy and weird DRM by either moving to locked-down platforms (iOS and consoles) or into games that have essential online components.
It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. I'd love to by a game and install it on my PC without it taking things over, and the publishers would love to write that and not worry about DRM. But we can't get that because each of us doesn't trust the other party to defect.
Then I guess I won't be gaming anymore. Not that I do much now, and I've mostly quit for other unrelated reasons, but if is the future of gaming, you can count me, and I'm sure many others, out.
I used to game a lot. I used to spend a not insignificant amount of money on games. If the publishers want to basically steal my money and call me the thief, then they can forget about having me as a customer.
Actually it is the future, and like you I too don't buy games much any more. Your kids or your peer's kids though will play games this way because it is the only way to get them and they will think its 'normal.' Eventually you'll be called an 'old timer' and derided for all your comments about how in your day when you bought a game it didn't need to download 4GB of 'patches' nor did it require Internet access to run.
What is most curious though, is whether or not this new world order is stable long term. Other creative works publishers like movie studios or musicians, can capture the long tail of revenue for their products long after the initial 'rush' but for game studios and other 'active' products there is this continual draw on the host companies resources to keep servers alive or what not. So eventually keeping a game 'alive' starts generating negative money. And killing a game generates negative customer sentiment. So the combination might overwhelm the business model.
Yep. I think this is the future of gaming according to EA and a few of the other traditional AAA studios. Not every Publisher is this hostile to users or treats them the way EA or Ubisoft does. Publishers such as Valve, Square Enix, 2k Games have been friendly and respectful to PC gamers for the most part in recent years by using only Steam DRM and avoiding too much "consolitis[1]" in PC games (some of 2k games titles are iffy, but overall they have more hits than misses).
Then we have all the really great indie games coming out, like the successor to Dungeon Keeper Series[2] that looks good enough to be AAA (though no where near the price range), but is crowd funded. We also have a great alternative to Blizzard's Diablo with Torchlight. Some studios will go the way of EA and others I think will be the opposing side. Who will win though I think is up for debate, but I prefer to be optimistic.
> "So eventually keeping a game 'alive' starts generating negative money"
When a game nears that point, the publishers can theoretically push a patch that removes the "must be online" components and/or allows connection to self-run servers, so the community can keep it alive.
I'm aware of a few companies actually doing something like this. Years ago, Parallax/Outrage/Volition (of the Descent series) went out of their way to give the community the assets they'd need to keep the series alive.
Perhaps, but companies like that are the exception, not the rule. I fully expect that companies like EA don't give a warm bucket of spit about anything past the initial phase during which a game will be sold.
I'm not sure if this is the future. Perhaps for the masses, to some point, as you write. However, I already find myself uninterested in any large productions, cause in the end they are indeed all the same... I gamed a lot in the past. Nowadays, I am buying Humble Indie Bundles, and I am truly excited about Kickstarter funded games. It seems to me, that the real creativity is transitioning to there.
Killing a game does generate negative customer sentiment, but if you have a game that hardly anybody plays anymore it's probably not enough to keep them from pulling the plug.
My guess is for "cult favorites" after some period of time they'll just push out a patch that removes the DRM and turn the servers off. Then it's just a question of losing multiplayer.
This is not the future of gaming. Look at how badly SimCity flopped.
Let me compare to DotA2 which I play a lot. It's exclusively multiplayer and thus needs an internet connection, yet it's free to play. How much have I spent on it? At this point at least $75+ dollars. THIS IS THE FUTURE OF GAMING.
Valve has the right model. I know valve didn't create the F2P model but it has implemented it the best as far as I know. They have pulled more money out of me giving me a free game then they would have made if they sold me 60+ copy.
EA should of just given out free copies of SimCity. Given out free copies with enough features to keep me entertained without the need to spend money. Then releasing toolsets for modders to create items; resell them to us for profit.
The DLC will surely be created but based on how EA conducts DLC in The Sims 3, I expect expensive expansions and stuffer packs.
Online-only play is exactly what I am talking about as the (dystopian) future of gaming. Pushing more and more of the game into the cloud, so it becomes SaaS instead of worrying about DRM.
Freemium versus pay-up-front are both flavors of that.
Do we know that SimCity "flopped"? It's gotten lots of people angry at it, but that's not at all the same as not making money.
Valve's free to play is done well, because they don't force you to purchase items in the game in order to compete or find the game fun. They're aesthetic items that let one customize their characters, instead of crippling gameplay.
If others followed this model, free to play would not be given anywhere close to the bad name it typically conveys.
I'm tempted to believe that due to the simulation grunt work being done server-side. But people also said the same thing about WoW and Starcraft II, yet you can easily play either of those for free with fully functioning multiplayer (just not on Battle.net).
This is wrong. The simulation is not serverside. If you disconnect from the servers you can play your city all you want. The only serverside aspect is saves and social (including region play), which would be relatively easier to recreate.
Not necessarily. Implementing client-side saving would be trivial compared to the other kinds of DRM that have been successfully bypassed over the years.
Client side saving is already implemented. In a few instances where I disconnected from the server and continued to play, SimCity would try to push my work to the server on reconnect.
At times this wouldn't work and I would lose my progress, but I'm willing to attribute that to the fact that it was supposed to be a rare case backup mechanism, rather than the necessary crutch it is currently.
Why did they have to disable accelerated time in the single player game? I'm not disputing what you are saying -- the notion that it had a server-side engine for single player games seemed silly -- but that aspect of the story struck me as very odd.
The theory is that the client communicates with the server for saves based upon in-game time not wall-clock time. So cheetah speed forces the client to talk to the server more often for this purpose.
I made my statement based upon my experiences playing. For one, I played the game for 3 hours disconnected from the servers - I knew my progress wouldn't be saved but I just wanted to play. It seemed to work fine aside from region play and that my progress wasn't saved.
Another time I lost my internet connection for 15 minutes. I continued to play. When I got it back, it claimed it re-sync'd my game with the server. As a test I logged out and back in and it all looked the same.
Maybe there is some simulation on the server side. But it doesn't seem necessary based upon my experiences playing the game.
Another theory other than sbov's theory is that there is calculation done on the server side, but only for cities in a region not currently being played. As long as someone is playing in a region, the other cities are basically on rails, so nothing really changes for the players, but they still will correctly interact with cities currently being played.
I am only speculating here but the server may be verifying a client's simulation to prevent IAP/multiplayer cheating. (Who hasn't played the old SimCity games with infinite cash?)
If there's interest in it, it'll be done. The connections will be sniffed and reproduced and/or the online component will just be cracked out entirely, but if somebody wants to do it it will ultimately be done.
I fear the game might just in general not be good enough for this to happen. Replicated pirate servers barely work well enough for WoW, and that is a hugely successful, and arguably very good game.
I doubt SimCity 2013 is going to develop such a cult following to allow for these kinds of cracks.
> I fear the game might just in general not be good enough for this to happen.
My thoughts exactly; Giant Bomb's hour-long video review was pretty telling of the issues in the game that a lot of people just haven't been able to deal with yet. Problems that are only around because so much time was spent trying to implement the multiplayer aspect rather than focusing on the core gameplay itself.
I want a new SimCity game just as badly as everyone else, but at this point I'm looking towards other offerings in this space - hopefully by smaller companies - to hold the torch (any suggestions here would be excellent).
flat out lie. there are multiple well run servers that often outperform the legit ones.
this is also true for all games with server emulation or otherwise private servers, they work well and often exactly the same as their legit counterparts.
If you speak from 'experience', then I would suggest you didn't try hard enough to find a decent server.
either way, don't exaggerate and lie to make a point. make the fucking point and leave it at that.
Minecraft seems to be doing pretty well. EA can do whatever it wants, that doesn't mean every developer will follow in their path. Sure, lots will sell out, but more show up to take their place.
iOS and console piracy is in no way "rampant". It is possible. It is not mainstream. Most users don't pirate on those platforms, although those who do probably pirate a huge number.
PC game piracy at one point was fairly mainstream, but then installing PC games at all ceased to become mainstream.
Music and porn piracy is mainstream; streaming services sort of prevent that, at the cost of destroying revenue for creators/distributors. Movie/TV are probably at the tipping point (youtube and netflix helped a lot).
Constantly advertised in every free buy&sell paper constitutes mainstream, even if you don't like it.
>but then installing PC games at all ceased to become mainstream.
The number of people installing PC games has steadily increased. Maybe posting "facts" that are the opposite of reality isn't a great base for an argument.
Same here, I love re-visiting old titles. Even dead-ish MMOs these days, such as Everquest, have 3rd party servers that still let you play something similar to the original game.
...and if games these days really are dependent upon services at the publisher working to do more than just validate DRM (which can usually be worked around with some very clever TOS-voiding hackery providing a local server and lying to the game client), there won't even be a way that they could just "tell the game to switch it off" before they decomm that service.
This is like the "good old days" of TV and movies, when you could only watch the Wizard of Oz once a year at Halloween, and you couldn't watch any old movies at all unless they came on the Late Show or showed at a local art theater.
I don't know why a game publisher wouldn't want to sell new copies of old games forever, like you can do with movies in the good new days.
Quip seen on Twitter [1]: "Disabling features of SimCity due to ineffective central infrastructure is probably the most realistic simulation of the modern city."
It's an interesting case study. This happens with nearly every MMO and people grumble but accept it. Within a couple weeks, the server issues are mostly resolved and people don't think about it anymore.
And yet, people are pissed about this. The fact that people see the game as single player seems to make a huge difference. It seems the lesson is that, if you want to do the always-on thing, you need to design your game so that it doesn't even make sense to play it alone.
I'm really curious to see what SimCity's sales are like in a month though. I wouldn't be too terribly shocked if people just sucked it up and bought it anyway as long as the servers are stable. If that happens, then maybe EA didn't make such a mistake after all?
Server woes are a necessary evil with MMOs, and people buy the game knowing they'll have to deal with some amount of downtime due to maintenance, overcrowding or just plain growing pains.
Try telling FPS players that their game will be unavailable every Tuesday morning for 6-12 hours and they'll probably riot -- that's standard downtime in the MMO world though.
No, that's actually standard WOW downtime. Check out Eve Online. They've been gradually decreasing downtime.
Last time I played, it was like 30 minutes every day, with 15 minutes just for the cluster to reboot (the client has a nice server status, with a countdown and ETA). Their goal was to reduce it to zero (it was 1 hour when I first started playing).
WoW has similarly minor downtime most weeks, but the point still stands: MMO players are willing to tolerate significantly longer and more frequent interruptions due to the nature of the games and the architecture necessary to support them.
I don't know how much simulation is being done server-side or how resource intensive it is, but if the Sim City of 10+ years ago was possible without it, I'm pretty sure EA could've done this one without it as well. Smells like an excuse to me.
AFAIK, Guild Wars 2 has essentially zero downtime for updates. There was a talk posted online a while ago about their backend tools and architecture. It's really very impressive actually.
I am not sure that is true. What other than DRM stops people from setting up their own competing servers? What other than a lack of incentive for the game makers prevents community-run servers from interoperating, creating an enormous peer-to-peer universe?
There is no DRM in an MMO. What stops you is the lack of them giving you the server software.
Facebook doesn't give you their server software either, would you call that DRM?
This is absolutely no different. Considering that a huge proportion of Hacker News is devoted to web based startups, you would think that this would be fairly obvious.
Thus explaining why people need to do things like patch the game and/or modify their hosts file in order to connect to third-party servers. If trying to authenticate the server you connect to and leaving you with no options for connecting to third party servers is not DRM, what would you call it?
"What stops you is the lack of them giving you the server software."
Nope, the protocols are reverse engineered and people create their own server software.
> Nope, the protocols are reverse engineered and people create their own server software.
Which is one of two reasons (the other being anti-cheating) that newer games withhold a large part of the game logic on the server side. It is possible to reverse engineer game logic but impractical: you might as well rewrite the game.
If you have a look at efforts to reverse engineer Diablo 3, you'll see that most of the game is missing without the server. You can run around but you can't do anything.
As far as interoperating community-run servers: cheating is the first thing that comes to mind. A lot of restrictions in MMO's are not so much for DRM as they are for maintaining fairness in the game, or preventing people from destroying the in-game economy.
People are pissed because it's an artificial restriction. People understand that talking to a server is necessary for an MMO to work, and they also understand it is not necessary for SimCity to work.
When an MMO talks to a server. it's in the user's best interest. When SimCity tries to talk to a server, it's against the user's best interest, who might want to play in a place without an internet connection, but is prevented to do so by a system that does nothing for him or her to begin with. It's weird that this is not obvious.
I'm skeptical about EA doing this because they are scary and evil (although I won't argue with that specifically).
I am open to the idea that there is much more to the simulation than users are able to replicate on their own computers at home. I wish EA/Maxis would address specifically why an always on connection is required, so we don't have an abnormal amount of unfounded nerdrage opinions floating around about DRM.
DRM sucks, for sure, but I doubt that's the only reason this game requires a connection.
I am not open to the idea that there is that much more to the simulation. If there was, there wouldn't be reports of people being able to play without connection for extended periods as long as they don't try to interact with the region.
As far as I can determine, and others (I frequent /r/simcity, this seems the consensus) agree, the requirement for the connection boils down to two things:
1. Maxis thought that the interaction between various cities in a region and the global marketplace for resources was good multiplayer gameplay.
2. DRM.
Which reason is actually primary will probably only ever be known by insiders of EA/Maxis.
If the simulation is more complex than a gaming PC can handle, wouldn't that mean that EA needed to (if at capacity) provide a better machine (that they have to maintain) for every copy sold? That doesn't seem sane.
> The fact that people see the game as single player seems to make a huge difference.
Indeed. And there's also the fact that MMO are — for the most part — "long term" experiences. Now single-player games can be as well, but for the most part are not, the majority of Diablo III buyers have probably moved on already to some other games, where a WoW player will be in it for years, so the rough few first weeks aren't much of an issue.
I wouldn't be too terribly shocked if people just sucked it
up and bought it anyway as long as the servers are stable.
Agreed. I have a couple of friends who are avoiding it, but I have colleagues that are going to get the game anyway despite whinging about EA being terrible.
(The above is anecdotal at best, but my gut feeling is that this will hurt EA in more than the very short term. See also: Blizzard with Diablo 3.)
If they had called this Sim City Online and marketed as not the next Sim City, but more of an MMO like Ever Quest, Guild Wars, and Star Wars Galaxies would be people be complaining as much if they knew they had to be online to play it.
Sim City 4, 2000, and the original still run perfect and are extremely fun to play. Sim City 4 is on Steam even making it easy to get right now. I'm tempted to pick that up since I have not played it. I loved the original and 2000 though.
In another discussion on hn, someone was basically saying "no one acts so surprised when you can't access Facebook if your internet connection is down, why are they so ticked off here?" I'd argue that it's because most people have a reasonable expectation that a locally-installed, single-player game should work regardless of connectivity.
There may be potentially valid technical reasons why SimCity might need or even want a persistent connection, but you absolutely need to call that out.
With EA's record of shutting down still-active servers for the multi-player portions of games that were just a few years old, I would be very reticent to buy an EA product that required a server even for single-player mode.
Yeah I agree, how can a mega billion company like EA fail so badly on marketing. Strategy should've been simple:
1) release it as sim city online, with marketing emphasizing it's like a sim city mmo. People will be more tolerant of launch network issues. Make lots of $$$
2) later release single player sim city 5 (just rip out online parts from above) make more $$$
The problem is that, realistically, "SimCity Online" would have bombed. City-building isn't a co-op game, and SimCity customers are not co-op gamers. CitiesXL tried to market itself as that, and it bombed, so now they de-emphasize the online aspects.
The ugly truth remains the same: this game is "social" just as an excuse to implement hardcore DRM. Sugar-coating.
The game honestly works quite well if you do think of it as a co-op game. A real life friend made a region, and I founded a city in his region.
You can do things like:
- volunteer excess services such as fire trucks, police cars, trash pickup, recycling trucks. The last one there can be lucrative if you use the raw materials you collect to build processors.
- buy water/power/etc utility capacity on an as-needed basis. Instead of having a brownout if your city grows but you forgot to scale up your electricity production, it'll just buy some automatically from other cities in the region
- town hall upgrade modules, such as the "department of transportation" which allows more transit options (train/ferry), "department of education" that allows colleges and universities, etc are shared with the region. Each time you level up your city hall you are allowed to add one of the department modules. Eventually you get to a point where you need over 290k citizens, but want some of the upgrades from a department you haven't built yet. A neighboring city can build those departments to help you out.
- After spending a bunch of money on university research and applying for a great works project, cities can contribute the resources needed to build these large scale products, and all the cities in the region benefit. Great works projects are things like a major airport, a huge solar collector (the size of a city), a space program, etc. Some bring tourists, some provide resources, etc.
The game is extremely social, but if you'd like you can ignore it. I'm in agreement with everyone here that if you want to ignore the social and play offline, you should be able to.
CitiesXL bombed because it's awfully made and incredibly painful to play from a gameplay standpoint. It's sure gorgeous, but doesn't hold a candle to even Sim City 4 in terms of fun.
So what would make it different from a regular SimCity game? The fact that it has the word online after it? That's a weak argument at best. They from the start called it a new game, not a sequel, and its been known for a long time that it would have the always-on component.
The game was never meant to be a sequel. That's why it's calls SimCity and not SimCity 5. People just decide to interpret it as such even if its not.
No I'm questioning why you are saying they should have come up with a different name like SimCity Online and start afresh when they did just that... But with the normal SimCity name. Maybe I didn't word it well, I'm running on 2 hours of sleep.
Because there's a semantic difference between "SimCity" and "SimCity Online."
SimCity's been a single-player offline experience since its inception. It's reasonable to believe in a vacuum that a newly-released "SimCity" game will be the same.
Lots of people are in such a vacuum -- a LOT of people hear "A new SimCity game is coming out / has come out" in their periphery and, having enjoyed its past iterations, rush to buy the new copy. Their surprise in finding that it's an entirely online experience is reasonable here.
Calling it "SimCity Online" could have dampened this effect, causing some -- if not a lot -- of people to stop and think "Wait, what makes it Online? Oh, it's more like an MMO."
I'm sure they had discussions about whether they should have called it "SimCity Online." I think they made the wrong decision, but maybe they thought that people would assume "online == free-to-play."
They could still have all these social/online features and not require internet-DRM to play.
You play your game, and if you want to do something social and the servers are down -- it sucks, but you can still play, and take part in the social stuff when it is up and working.
For online saves -- there is a local backup for when the online system is down.
These are not difficult things. They are just trying to fight an ever-losing battle against piracy.
Diablo III has shown that it's not an ever-losing battle, as unfortunate as that may be for the consumer caught in the middle in the foreseeable future.
If you want to play 2000, GOG.com has it for 6 bucks. Works perfectly on my mac, and I love playing it while offline on my long train ride. It's a shame, since when I am offline is the only time I play games, that I won't get to play the new one...
Sim City 4 is (still) superb. However, you will likely want to mod it to get the most out of it. There are also a lot of pointlessly finicky things in terms of maintaining a good budget.. enough so that I just enable a cheat for tons of money and forget about budgeting altogether (since the rest of the game is so deep, skipping financial worries loses you little and gains you a lot).
I grabbed it on Steam last year after losing my hard copy some years ago. If one waits for a big Steam sale or adds Sim City 4 to their wish list, they get notified when it goes on sale and the typical price is 4.99 with all the addons as well. Lots of community mods out there for the game for anyone interested that fix some bugs like traffic issues.
Yeah I just loaded SimCity 4 onto my wifes Eee PC over the network and it runs fine (not even ridiculously low settings).
SimCity games were always able to hit the casual gamer, you never needed a hardcore gaming PC to play. Why SimCity 5 needs things processed server side is just for the sake of bullshit DRM.
The only way for EA to recover from this will be to release it DRM free (or at most with the serial key DRM of days gone), otherwise SimCity 5 won't even be remembered beyond the news articles of 2013. As an avid SimCity player I can recall every game, I'll never recall SimCity 5 as at this point I'll never get to play it.
> As an avid SimCity player I can recall every game, I'll never recall SimCity 5 as at this point I'll never get to play it.
Likewise :)
Played all the Sim City games all the way back to Sim City Classic (though I played it on SNES). Played the rest on PC and also rebought Sim City 2k on gog.com a while ago for nostalgia. Even my brothers, who I would only consider casual gamers were always able to play them without a problem.
I'll never touch Sim City 5 though unless it comes to Steam and without the always online DRM.
Steam requires authentication with their servers, and that authentication is cache-able for offline access, for a period up to a month before requiring reauthentication.
It is DRM, but I don't find it to be onerous.
Individual publishers may add additional DRM measures, at their option. Those can sometimes be painful, but are clearly stated on the steam store page for each piece of software.
Additional DRM measures are usually stated, but sometimes things are omitted or notifications not removed when the additional DRM gets removed. I've bought a few games before that said they still had the DRM, but they no longer did (things like secure rom, games for windows live, etc).
I'm always paranoid and check both the Big Steam DRM List[1] and also the Steam Forums to make sure there isn't any additional DRM not listed. Especially since refunds are hard to deal with on Steam.
12 years ago I quit gaming because decent titles weren't available for Linux. I now have a great job and family, part of which I attribute to spending thousands of hours learning about life and technology instead of playing games.
Give it up people, video games = fast-forwarding your life.
(Actually I'm not really suggesting being that strict. I did return to play the occasional top title like Portal 2, but on a strictly controlled diet. Gaming should be a small enough part of your life that such DRM is a non-issue)
You're right, but you don't go far enough. Not only should we mostly give up games, but also film, TV, fictional books, travelling for pleasure, non-procreative sex. All they do is hurt society, cause pollution and produce nothing. Hell, why are you wasting time on a family? Think of all the Ruby books you could have read.
Except, in addition to being pleasurable, media shapes our society and culture. That we do more than just working to survive is perhaps one of humanity's defining features, and we should be embracing it. Video games are similar to books or film, in that they have dramatically influenced many of our minds and lives. That's why we get upset when publishers see our obsession and game merely as something to exploit for profit, then throw away, rather than as something that should be preserved as part of society's collective knowledge. Even if the DRM probably won't directly cause us any problems ever, it makes us uncomfortable. I noticed when playing the latest release of Metal Gear Solid, how significant the series has been to me.
When I played MG/MGS1, I was young - and, among other games, shared controller gameplay was a bonding experience between me and my friends. These friends are still my strongest, so no doubt it helped cement the friendship. MGS2 was when I was about 10, and starting to think somewhat philosophically. The ideas about AI and censorship, trans-humanism, robotics and nanotechnology significantly changed me and perhaps shaped my beliefs and future (in combination with films like The Matrix which I watched at the same time). MGS3, I played with my girlfriend when we first met - and even now we still talk about it, and have played it a few times since. I played MGS4 relatively recently, now moved out, living with girlfriend and working. That video game series, however, has been there, influencing my life in various ways from the sidelines - and that's just one video game out of hundreds I've played over the years. I remember when playing Sega Megadrive games when I was very young, trying to work out how they were made. It perhaps is when I started to get interested in programming.
Sure, you shouldn't be playing them all day every day - but that's just the age old problem of procrastination, living a balanced life and work before play. If you go too far down this path of maximum productivity, you start to burn out. Finding the play/work balance is hard, because on the one side is extreme sloth, and on the other is a path that, I believe, ends up making you a kind of solipsist/nihilist burnout.
To offer an alternate perspective: I owe video games a great debt. I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't thrown myself to whole-heartedly into playing and making video games right out of highschool. My passion for them got me my first job as a developer despite having extremely limited experience.
Giving up video games, for me, likely would have meant I was working a menial job for low pay. Games are a huge part of life for a lot of people and it's totally possible to engage with them meaningfully, often and still have it be healthy.
> Give it up people, video games = fast-forwarding your life.
While I agree with you in principle – I doubt I play more than one or two games a year – I resent your sanctimonious tone.
You've no way of knowing how people are using their games. Modern games present a lot of opportunities for exploring power and morality. Even sexuality. For some, the escapism represented by games may be as close to vacation or therapy as economic reality allows. For others, they're a vacuous waste of time that could be better spent.
My wife did excellent work on a training simulator, and regularly impressed both the military customer and higher ups on the corporate side.
She credited three video games with building her most impressive skills: Descent taught her to visualize and maneuver in 3D space, Starcraft taught her to think about force composition and disposition, and Nethack taught her to make thousands of decisions (and type thousands of characters) without making mistakes.
She still games pretty extensively (she'll be taking Tuesday off for the SC2 expansion), and has a great job and family. And at least part of her excellence is due to the way she uses video games to sharpen her mind.
25 years ago I started gaming because I was 4 and was given an NES and it was fun and stuff. I now have a great job and girlfriend, none of which I attribute to all the video games I continue to play.
Give it up people, trolling the Internet = fast-forwarding your life.
On the other hand, the only reason I first started to use Linux was so that I could run an SRCDS server for Counter-Strike and host Ventrilo. If video games were restricting you from having relationships (or "learning about life") maybe it is better that you stopped. Most normal people game with more moderation.
Having played simcity as much as the servers have allowed since launch, there are definitely a number of online tie-ins. I'm sure they could have done it with player run servers or LAN type connectivity, but it removes the social aspect of the game. I rather line being able to look at the leader board, then load the cities listed there to see what they look like.
Playing with a few friends in a region is a pretty cool idea, though there are fewer interactions as I would have liked, there are still a lot.
Their server connectivity is definitu beyond just DRM, but it's hard to say how they could have done their design without the server aspect.
They could have designed the game like the past SimCity games. Single player mode that give you God mode and multiplayer games that let you play with your friends and enjoy the benefits of multiplayer. What's essentially happened here is that SimCity 5 is a multiplayer only game and there is no real single player game bundled with it.
I'm mixed on this. I really dislike online DRM, but one of the greatest weaknesses of SimCity 4 was that the average home computer had no hope of simulating a large city.
This is still true today - while most computers could handle the graphics engine behind it, the simulation engine would still eat your machine for lunch.
Moving the city simulation server-side certainly has its justifications - it opens up the field to more players with weaker machines.
That being said, it's hard to imagine that, given the ginormous increase in CPU performance between SimCity 4 and now, that they couldn't have made a simulation engine fast enough (and optimized enough) to run offline.
That's a smokescreen, there's no way they are offloading any significant amount of processing to remote servers, compared to the local CPU power. The economics just can't work.
Indeed. It is definitely not possible that they are offloading a home PC worth of compute power per user on the server side. The idea is just laughable, at least at this stage.
The problem is that EA keeps producing games, and people keep buying them. Until everyone just says screw EA and stops buying any of their games it won't matter.
Plus, if that was truly the case then the economical thing to do would be to ship a SimCity server so that players could run their own regions at their own cost. It neatly answers some of the "how can I play this in 10 years" questions and yet allows for the supposed benefits of server-side simulation.
Is this actually the case? I've seen a lot of people say it, but then I've also seen some people say that they were able to keep playing for considerable periods of time even while the servers were offline. It sounds like one of those things where marketing-speak got misinterpreted as a technical design that isn't actually how it's built, but I really haven't investigated besides reading comments.
It's tricky because of the lack of concrete information. IMO the claim is substantiated by the fact that they turned off the highest simulation speed in an effort to increase server capacity - so clearly the server is tied into the basic simulation to some degree. How deep the ties go is hard to tell. If this was purely a DRM maneuver I highly doubt server capacity would be in any way tied to game speed.
My theory is that the game speed was reduced because at regular intervals your PC needs to check in with the server to: a) transfer resources between cities in a region, b) update leader boards, c) save your city.
The slower the game, the less often they have these hits to their servers.
That sounds to me like they're doing regular checkins (DRM-related, or stats, or autosaves, or something) whose frequency depend on the game speed. I just saw a review[1] which indicated that the game ran fastest when it couldn't talk to the servers.
I think it's very hard to say how much of the simulation is happening online. When I was playing last night I repeatedly got messages saying I'd been disconnected and then a few minutes later that I was reconnected. The game played fine between those messages. That said, I did notice some weirdness. For example, sewage and electricity and water would be perfectly fine one moment and then the next they would be way overloaded. I could interpret this as meaning the that part of the sim was happening online, or I could chalk it up to just being how the game goes.
I also ran into what many others have seen in the first few days. I built up a large city over a few hours and then quit. When I started back up, nothing was there. The city was claimed but it was a clean slate. You might see this from any number of things. Maybe the sim is all on the computer. Maybe the saves are just borked. Maybe the saves are fine on one node but haven't been replicated to whatever node I my request got load balanced to when i reconnected.
All your city is managed in your local PC. Everything runs fine, only saving is cloud. Proof is that people have played though server crashes without noticing, up to 40 minutes.
But, region management is server side.
So basically, if one manages to skip log in and makes save-s local then one can play single city offline.
This is as much information as I have at the moment.
I've been looking forward to this game for years now. I thought it would never come. And now that it's here I'm totally saddened and appalled that EA would ruin such an incredible legacy for such petty reasons.
There has to be another way to stem piracy without totally obliterating the value of an otherwise excellent game...
If anyone could achieve a decent launch, it's blizzard. They have a lot of money and talent, and a real attention to detail. They're willing to wait to ship games "till they're ready"
But launch still eludes them. I've purchased every game through Diablo 3, but that put me off the whole thing. Heart of the swarm will be the first Blizzard game i just don't bother with. The launch will be a disaster. Since they've taken away any reason for me to get excited about the launch, i've found that really leaks over into my excitement about the game.
Good luck to EA, good luck to Blizzard, you've committed your businesses to a technical infrastructure you're just not competent to build or manage. Seems like a risky strategy to me. Especially because games aren't really that important. It's not critical like food. There are a bunch of other offerings available.
> But launch still eludes them. I've purchased every game through Diablo 3, but that put me off the whole thing. Heart of the swarm will be the first Blizzard game i just don't bother with. The launch will be a disaster.
This seems to me a bold claim to make. Diablo III's launch was, in many ways, a huge new service for them, a new infrastructure to test and maintain, and they were quick to fix issues with it. Compare this to the launch of The Burning Crusade expansion pack -- it was a rough launch! -- but over time, they managed to smooth their systems out such that now, even a content launch as huge as Mists of Pandaria went smoothly.
WoW is a different game, but it illustrates their iterative healing process. Since the Wings of Liberty launch went smoothly, I wouldn't expect anything less of Heart of the Swarm, as it's being released on a system that's here, ready, polished, and tested. We might see a few hiccups, but nothing close to Diablo III.
I'd hardly call Battle.net an infrastructure that Blizzard is "just not competent to build or manage."
I had a bit of nerd rage over the d3 release. I never could convince anyone there to delete my battle.net account, so I had to settle for an authenticator. Then, of course, I deleted the authenticator from the phone.
Blizzard makes great stuff. I, however, have limited time. I wound up paying more that a dollar a minute for the time I got to played d3. I have no interest in buying another blizzard game, ever.
Can someone explain what exactly happened with SimCity? From the article I gather that it had something to do with DRM but the author never explained what exactly made it unplayable.
You have to be connected to their servers to play it, just like you would with an MMO style game. Unfortunately, just like an MMO style game at launch, their servers are totally overloaded right now and many people are just completely unable to play the game.
The uproar is because the online requirement isn't inherently necessary to the gameplay (although EA has done their best to add some multiplayer aspects). It's primarily a business decision intending to make it more difficult to pirate or buy the game used.
The latest, just released, version of SimCity includes a form of DRM which basically involves hosting a part of the game's functions on a server, so that the only way to play the game is to be connected to the server. Due to whatever reason, likely poor capacity planning, a huge number of people who have bought the game have not been able to play it at all due to the servers being overloaded or inaccessible.
Trouble downloading and installing the game, massive login queues (that recheck the queue once every 30 minutes), trouble creating cities, troubles loading creating cities, disconnections, features have been removed to help handle stress, etc.
Basically, it's hard to get it downloaded and installed.
If you do that, it's very difficult to login to play.
If you manage that, it's very difficult to do the tutorial or claim a city or load your city.
If you manage that, it's very difficult to play the game without experiencing disconnects or server-related dysfunction that directly affects gameplay.
Basically, it's nothing like the experience they wanted to deliver.
> let it be yet another lesson to publishers like EA and Activision/Blizzard, and platform owners Microsoft and Sony, who may be considering always-on DRM in next-gen consoles or PC games: don't even think about it. It's a pipe dream
But this is Always-Online DRM done wrong. You DO NOT prioritize prevention of pirate-enabled playing of your game. You DO NOT implement anything which causes legitimate users to not be able to play. You DO prioritize UX over anything else at launch. You bias heavily to avoid false positives. Legit users (i.e. customers) are your first priority -- as they should be.
Most of all, you do not live in the fantasy world of DRM being some kind of impenetrable fortress. Basically, the resources of the entire Internet are arrayed against you, and the forces on your side constitute several hundred people in your company at most. You as the game publisher aren't the evil empire. You're the guerrillas. You don't have a vast army and an impenetrable fortress. You have a few fighters on your side and a jungle to hide in.
Here is what you do: You prioritize detection. You let the pirates play. You let the pirates believe that they've broken your DRM by throwing some honeypot DRM at them for them to break. All the while, you're detecting them. Then, when they think they've won, you use assets that you can control (servers) to restrict the pirate-enabled users you've detected. The point here is to be the one to keep the pirates guessing, not the other way around. Let them announce cracks, then make sure they get egg on their face a week after their "release -- again and again. Basically, you fight dirty to make sure that your product is far superior to the pirate's.
The way to have DLC in the modern age is to make sure that a key element of your "DLC" always stays on the server.
I do not understand the gamer community. EA has been treating you guys like crap for years and you keep coming back for more. Just stop buying their products. I know it sucks not to have access to a new game, but make a stand for an industry you care about and stop supporting a lousy company that has distain for you.
I treat anything that is DRM-encumbered as a rental, and make buying decisions accordingly. It is not something I own, and I do not expect to be able to use it beyond a certain time horizon (a year or two).
Yep. For any game with severely limiting DRM, the maximum price I'm willing to pay is $5, which I deem fair for an indeterminate rental with no guarantees.
I think Assassin's Creed 2 has been down to $6 a couple times on Steam sales, but I'm not quite willing to put down even one extra dollar. Oh well, their loss. Meanwhile, I've spent a couple hundred dollars on Kickstarter games in the recent past, all of which promised a DRM free option.
I'm sorry but as a gaming enthusiast, I'm experiencing some major schadenfreude here.
EA's tactics, ethics and influence have been the worst in the industry for the last 10 years. Pushing DRM, buying up smaller studios, releasing endless add-on packs and DLC. Thankfully I haven't been addicted to any of their games since Dungeon Keeper. That was a great game.
I feel so sorry for guys and girls responsible for keeping the systems up and running at EA. Days without sleep, without a doubt. And I'm sure their managers are cracking the whips and blaming all the bad things an them.
I've been kind of surprised by ign's writing lately. They've gotten a lot more thoughtful, past the simple game review writing and have much more intelligent pieces these days.
I don't actually think this is a danger of always on DRM more growing pains from an industry (gaming) that is learning how to build infrastructure that can scale to the size of their audience. Games are going to move toward becoming services just like any popular web app you use in your day to day life and I am not mad about that. I don't ever give a second though to whether Pivotal Tracker, Evernote or Flickr will be around in a few years, I accept the thought that may not be and use the tools because I enjoy them.
Gaming as a medium is trying to evolve and find a business model that can allow them to scale games to audiences that are bigger and trying to make them more complex without having to tap into all the power your computer / console may have. I have worked in the game industry and while I can support people being upset and I am more interested in how this impacts the type of gameplay experiences we have in the future.
I would be interested in seeing startups spring up around supporting cloud infrastructure and analytics for game companies. Sort of like an amazon for Game Devs
Can someone confirm that the online mode offers nothing but DRM? The fact that they had to disable Cheetah speed makes me think they really are offloading some of the game simulations to the servers. It certainly feels like a much speedier game then SimCity 4 (when it works).
I don't expect more game companies to stay away from this; I expect them to do this a lot more for PC gaming. Probably not explicitly, but as much as people in /r/technology insists piracy doesn't matter, the companies continue to care. With online games, the need to worry about that largely evaporates.
Instead, I expect companies to put in proper rate limiting, fallbacks, and plan for the ability to spin up extra servers in case of high demand.
They are, but leaving the description at "parts of the game logic" could be taken to mean the servers are being used to offload compute-intensive tasks. Centralization for the sake of performance is understandable, but not allowing offline saves sounds more like centralization for the sake of centralization.
I think that the regional city interactions and global market count as 'parts of the logic'. I agree it's not compute intensive, but it is fairly central to the design of the new SimCity. No reason the region couldn't be locally simulated IMO, however.
I dunno, you don't see the outcry when the thing is reliably up and working correctly. I play several games that are "always on" or "internet only," and we gamers seem completely fine with it as long as up-time is 99.99%.
People bought the game knowing the DRM would be heavy. That's not what's killing SimCity. The real reason this failed is because it broke. It crashed and burned terrifically. It was implemented poorly, and it was really unreliable.
The warning here is this: make shit that works. We would see the same outcry if an offline game crashed regularly, deleted saves, and had bugs on opening day that made it unplayable.
Having been required to defend undefensible companies policies in some customer service jobs I previously held, I feel really sorry for the customer service agent here. Probably somebody hoping to use this job as a leg up to something better, but now he is stuck in angry customer hell with nothing to do but quote policies that make them angrier. And his performance is probably being judged based on some customer satisfaction survey where even one unsatisfied customer is enough to lose a month's worth of bonuses.
That said, I don't think this is as "simple" as something like an Origins "online presence" crack. I just don't think there's enough data about what the "online" part does (specifically the processing done remotely) to actually produce a fully-working crack at this time.
Which in a way relates to Irregardless's post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5345217. One of my favorite MMO's Ragnarok Online won't get locked away and lost when Gravity decides to close it down, there are plenty of backends and open source projects that support the game.
I really prefer playing shards to the original game. Less/no grind, I can whiz through most of a MMO including the minimal story in a few months, the price isn't necessarily the issue, I just don't care to compete with millions of other people and devote several days a week to survive at that level and stay up to date (let alone be on "top".)
I want to have fun, I don't need artificial constraints to surpass. Thank goodness for these emulators, which are fun now and will continue to be fun when pocket-sized in the future :)
Online in its final packaging perhaps, but what effort would it take to get running locally? If one can play offline for a couple of minutes, the online portion is likely not as critical as it's being portrayed.
The truly disappointing thing to me, was that I was really excited and looking forward to playing Spore. That is another Maxis game produced by EA that I've completely lost interest in because of the DRM. From the sound of it, I need to stay away from this one too. It is as though EA doesn't want my money.
I somehow saw this coming as recent as Sim City 4. But all in all, this is proving to be a good improvement, but a bad implementation. What is even the need of the online DRM? is this another of those: " Try to save billions of dollars from piracy, that do not exist " ?
Why does it have to be a warning to publishers? Clearly customers keep coming back or they wouldn't keep repeating the same idiotic behavior. I'm not sure I feel sorry for anybody in this case other than the guy who was such a non-gamer he never heard of DRM.
It's all part of their plan.
Now that everyone claims to know what EA should have done, they're primed to buy the sequel, SimServer. Where you get to layout the network infrastructure for a new online game.
Oi... Don't get me started. I loved when my cousin would bring his PC over and we would just sit there playing CnC, Diablo or SC in LAN. Now we have to go online for everything and there is frequently issues.
1) Read opening text
2) See container (presumably a video) with no explanation. I cannot load the video.
3) Read next paragraph to see what the video was about. No explanation. Close tab.
Perhaps its because I play MMOs and other online-only games, but the endless complaining about DRM and always-online play is getting a little boring.
What I have to wonder, though, is how they botched the launch so badly. They know when they are launching, they (should) roughly know how many users each server can support, and they should have a rough idea of how many games they are going to sale in the first few days.
How did they screw it up?
Is forecasting game purchases that inexact? I'd think you could derive a number at least close to being accurate from the amount of pre-sales, then multiply it by some factor to give yourself some safety. At the very least, you'd think there'd be contingency plans for quickly standing up new servers in response to demand.
They seem to have fixed most of the performance problems in the last couple days. Still not sure why they couldn't have done this correctly from the start, but it's at least not horrible now.
The real question is: in what situation do you not have internet connection OR the server is down.
In this case, it appears the server has been down for a significant number of players. Therefore, many people can't play... even if everything is fine on your end.
If you can't trust that your city will be there tomorrow due to EA's shoddy servers, then there is very little incentive to even play the game. I guess it might happen with a local save as well... but local saves of a game seems like an easier problem to solve.
I'm moving house next week and won't have a connection to the internet for a little while. I'd rather pass the time playing SimCity than watch crap TV after work for a week or so.
I'm thinking this fail may be so epic it can kill always-on-DRM forever, force EA to back up on their customer-pissing force-feeding stuff like this
I'm not in the gaming industry, but launch is probably the most important event and, with this, they fucked the launch of one of the most adored, famous and known PC game franchises of the World
Firstly, the game reviews will suffer forever(that amazon rating is probably NEVER cease to be 1 star [unless EA starts paying chinese to do that too]), that must cost sales
Secondly and most important, word-of-mouth must account for A LOT of game sales, the hype of your friends, co-workers talking about a game must be the reason for most of non-hardcore-gamers sales... I, for example, only bought Diablo 3 because all my co-workers wouldn't shut about getting it, even tho I was a hardcore gamer in the past, played Diablo and Diablo 2, I wouldn't buy if it wasn't for the hype... people are PISSED and EA is probably losing a ton of money because of it
I'm almost certain this DRM will ultimately cost them considerably more than piracy would take, it's perfect!
As we say in Brazil: Time comes and the whip hits your own ass!
That's the part that concerns me the most. I still install (and play) lots of old games on every computer I own -- King's Quest VI, C&C: Red Alert, Worms: Armageddon, etc. And who could live without the console classics like Goldeneye or Ocarina of Time? All you have to do is pull out the disc (or cartridge), pop it in, and play.
We still don't know exactly what will happen with this new generation of games that consumers are merely "renting" from companies like EA, but piracy seems to be our only guaranteed method of preserving them. What happens if you want to play Battlefield 3 again 10 years from now? You might be able to access it IFF:
There's not much history to base this speculation on yet, but what little we do have shows that that's an extremely unlikely scenario. If there's any chance to preserve the games we're playing now, it's probably up to us to make it happen.