Simcity Burns

[stitch626]

Well that won't fly in any EU countries. EA must allow resell of digital games in any EU country if they wish to continue having a market there (EU court ruling last year). Too bad I live in the US in this instance.

I think Steam is covered under the ruling as well, though haven't heard of anything in that area yet.

Hmm, I wonder if I posted a petition related to this matter on the White House website, how many will support it.

[Tyyr]

Lawyers find ways around that kind of thing. In this case I'd start the argument with, "We're not selling you a game any more than a car rental place sells you a car. We're selling you access to one of our computers to play games on it but the games are property of EA."

Sort of how MMO's operate.

[Deepcrush]

Simple as this, I don't buy games I can't play and enjoy offline.

[stitch626]

Lawyers find ways around that kind of thing. In this case I'd start the argument with, "We're not selling you a game any more than a car rental place sells you a car. We're selling you access to one of our computers to play games on it but the games are property of EA."

Sort of how MMO's operate.

They could only get around that if there is no activation code (those annoying random strings of alphanumerics). Which there may not be for SC5, I haven't bothered with it yet.

But yeah, lawyers always find the loopholes... thats why our legal system is the mess it is.

[Teaos]

Living in Europe now I can say that the EU is massivly anti-piracy. So anything that stops it is going to be fine by them.

[Tyyr]

I’ve had some time to ponder the Sim City 5 (SC5) debacle and I’m starting to form some opinions, beyond the usual “Fucking EA” groundstate.

Why an always on-line game? What’s the possible reason for it? Well there are many but I think it can be summed up into four things. First, social gaming is a big buzzword right now. Corporations love buzzwords. Corporations want those buzzwords integrated into games. They figure if every game has an online multiplayer/social aspect it’ll suddenly be much more attractive to people. Never mind that Sim City isn’t the kind of franchise that attracts casual social gamers. Second, DRM. The way it’s setup right now this is probably the most effective DRM we’ve yet seen. The average gamer will never even have the entire game’s code on their computer. They’ve managed to keep a big part of the engine locked away on their servers so even if you could swipe what’s in the box/download it won’t do you any good.Third, it’s about killing the mod community. Sim City 4’s modding community creates a TREMENDOUS amount of new content for SC4. Fixes to the game engine, new buildings, transportation types, the modding community had something for everyone and it radically changed the game. And it was all free. You can practically hear the executives in the boardroom cringing at the thought of people finding ways to get more enjoyment out of their games for... *gasp* free. Always on DRM with server side calculations ensures that the mod community is boned. No worries though, EA will be there for you offering all kinds of new buildings and tools as DLC. Paid DLC because fuck you if you think you’re gonna enjoy a game without paying them every step of the way. Finally, they can control the game’s life cycle. Again, I can just imagine the exec’s talking about Sim City and someone bringing up that people played SC4 for a decade and them retching in their mouths at the thought of not being able to force gamers to buy the latest yearly update ala Madden, or any of their sports franchises, or the Call of Honorable Duty group. Paying $50 and playing for 10 years? Madness! With SC5 dependant upon their servers it’s entirely in their hands when they decide to turn the game off and force you to buy the next game in the series.

Something else to consider, all those servers, they cost money. A lot of money. A business isn’t going to add that large and ongoing expense to a game unless they think that the investment will result in higher profits than if they didn’t make it. They think that the combination of those four factors will make SC5 more profitable than if they didn’t have them. They really think that people want to play online with random assholes who might decide to build an industrialized, pollution ridden, crime ravaged dystopian megalopolis right next door to your agrarian Ecotopia. We don’t, or at least its not why we’re playing Sim City mainly. The buy into the idea that if they can just make the DRM good enough all those pirated “lost sales” will magically turn into real sales. They won’t. They think that without the mod community people will happily plonk down $5 or $10 a shot for “content” packs. Well... we probably will. Finally they think that when the decide to kill off SC5 to force the move to SC6 they know we’ll bitch and moan, but move anyways because history has told them that gamers love to bitch and moan but in the end they’re battered housewives who’ll just come back for more punishment again and again.

However, there may be a silver lining. All that server horsepower costs money, a lot of it. If this crappy launch can deter sales it could help. When piracy is discouraged, but sales figures don’t measurably increase it might finally help to drive home that a copy pirated is not a sale lost. If DLC sales are down because people refuse to support it because of what it did to mods it can help screw up the game’s profitability. Finally, if when SC5 closes its doors and everyone doesn’t buy SC6 until it has a guaranteed no internet connection required for single player mode, then this all might work out. In order for this game to be profitable EA needs all of these things to work together, they need the Angry Birds crowd to suddenly decide that SC sounds cool since you can play with random people. They need pirates to accept defeat gracefully and go buy copies of the game in massive numbers. They need to sell DLC like hotcakes and finally they need us all to pack up and accept the buggering when they want to herd us over to the next game in the series.

They need all this to work because the profit on this game will be down due to the DRM scheme. I can guarantee that you’re not going to get a tidal wave of Facebook gamers coming to the game just because it’s social. I can also guarantee that pirates will not take defeat gracefully and buy the game. Those two thing alone might be enough to sink SC5’s profitability and that will affect EA in the only weak spot it has, the bottom line.

EA’s taking a gamble with this always on scheme. They’ve sunk a lot of cash into the server farms for it. The profit margin on this game is much thinner than usual so if we were ever going to impact EA’s bottom line this is the game to do it with.

[Teaos]

The amount of nerd rage I have been reading on sites and blogs about this make me think its going to bust worse than Vista. I know tow people who have already returned it and a bunch more who said they arnt touching it even though they love the series.

[Tyyr]

I'm one of the ones who loves it and won't touch it. I started back with the game on the SNES (still have a copy of that on my Nexus 7) and I've owned all the SC games. There hasn't been a moment since SC 2000 that I haven't had at least one Sim City game on every computer I own. I still have SC4 on my computer. I will not touch Sim City 5. If they remove the requirement for an always on connection for single player I might buy a used copy down the road to try out single player but I'm not going to give EA a dime for this bullshit. Just like they managed to kill Mass Effect for me they've managed to torch Sim City. They're not getting my money. In fact after this its highly unlikely I'll be buying another game from EA ever.

Even once you get past the DRM issues the game itself is going in the completely opposite direction from what the series was headed before. It's like the bastard child of Societies. Smaller cities, no ability to build out the entire region (so your industrial megalopolis just ends at the white line and there's green pastoral fields by it), you can't alter the landscape, SMALLER CITIES.

It's not hard to make a good SC game. You increase the usable land area for building, maybe give us more control over the overall region (and how about some large scale terraforming tools to make big changes to the region all at once?) refine the engine some more, maybe throw in more complexity but be sure you can ignore it if you chose, and update the graphics. Yeah, if that's what they did I'd have snapped up SC5 right off the bat. But they didn't. They did the exact fucking opposite.

[Teaos]

Simcity is the worst possible sort of game to make social. I dont want other people to have anything to do with my city. Maybe, maybe a fun option would have been the ability to have the option to play online and form your city and a bunch of other ones into "states". Economic trade, education rules, resources swapping, climate. That would allow them to claim it is social play but still be able to play off line.

[Tyyr]

I think you definitely COULD make an online component for a game like Sim City. I think it's doable and could be fun. From what I've seen how they've implemented it IS NOT the way to make it work. If I want to make an agrarian eco-topia farm community (and I do like to make those sometimes), I'm just fucked if the asshole next to me decides to blacken the skies with smog. Sorry, you don't get to do what you want because xxxTVVATD3str0y3r666xxx is an asshole. An if he fucks his city up and leaves... oh well, if you don't like it then you have to abandon your city and start a new one hoping you don't get dropped somewhere equally shitty. Hell, even if the guy next to you is a good guy and you build co-dependant and bustling cities you had better hope he doesn't change his mind and bulldoze everything or else you'll take it in the shorts.

The core of the game though is single player playing god with your city.

[Tsukiyumi]

From Wikipedia:

On December 14, 2012, the SimCity development team ran a questions and answers session on the internet community Reddit where they received criticism for the game's DRM-mechanisms, which require the user to be permanently connected to Electronic Arts' servers in order to be able to play the game.[67][68] The video games-focused blog Kotaku also voiced concern over the issue, worrying that Electronic Arts could one day shut down their servers, rendering the game unplayable.[68]

This prompted a blog response from Lucy Bradshaw, Maxis Senior Vice President, in which she defended the always-online component with the comment that "real cities do not exist in a bubble; they share a region and affect one another." She goes on to say that increased connectivity to neighboring cities allows for a better experience, allowing for better trade and wider scale effects such as crime and pollution to keep synchronized across the region.[69] Bradshaw also noted the performance benefit due to the engine utilizing EA's server hardware to assist in gameplay calculations:

GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game -- the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer.
—Lucy Bradshaw, SVP Maxis[69]

And she just doesn't even answer that question. Which effectively answers that question. They plan to do exactly what you suggested and shut down, forcing players to buy the next one. Bullshit. Good thing SC4 is still fun.

[Tyyr]

That Reddit Q&A was brutal. Not trolls, but people with well reasoned questions and serious criticism. They came expecting a lot of "OMG Sim City IS TEH AWES0M3!" and got their asses handed to them.

Glassbox is bullshit. Glassbox is DRM, it's got nothing to do with handling calcs. You can't tell me that the servers have the hardware that's going to top what I've got at home. People who have actually been able to play the game have reported CPU utilizations of 15% or less at peak 15% Utilization is not using the CPU at all. That activity is handling sending the data to the servers and getting it back and maybe a few minor things. Glassbox is not about sharing calculation load (with how tiny the cities are you don't need to) it's entirely about keeping critical game engine components on their servers so that you can't pirate or mod their game.

[Teaos]

So is it possible for someone to steal the base code and run a pirate server?

[stitch626]

So is it possible for someone to steal the base code and run a pirate server?

Yes.

[Teaos]

A customer service call thats gone viral on game blogs and reddit.

Adrian: I am sorry for any inconvenience that this has caused. I can offer you a 15% off coupon from Origin with your next purchase.
Adrian: I am sorry, but I can not offer you a refund.
you: Why can't you offer me a refund?
you: Your product is defective
Adrian: Return Policy
you: I can call my bank and have the refund done that way.
Adrian: I can offer to assist you with any trouble shooting issues.
you: Why can Amazon users get refunds but I can't?
Adrian: That is understandable, but I must inform you that if you choose to dispute it, your account will be banned.
Adrian: I am sorry, but I can not speak on another company's policy.
Adrian: Now this just released.
you: I am at a loss of words
Adrian: So the servers are having issues, with more servers opening up as other countries release then we will show these issues resolving themselves.
you: Yes, but it is not capacity demand I am debating
Adrian: I can understand this causing frustrations and I do apologize for this.
you: Your servers are not the issue
you: The game/back end is
you: "Game updates" are not an excuse to hide behind
Adrian: I am sorry, but I am not able to process a refund.
Adrian: Is there anything else that I can assist you with?
you: You were offering refunds according to your press release!!!!
you: In response to the launch day trouble Hatam said " If you regrettably feel that we left you down, you can of course request a refund for your order at http://help.origin.com/contact-us , though we are currently still in the process of resolving this issue. "
you: Why lie??
you: I have done nothing wrong in expecting what is quoted.
Adrian: That is correct, that this is where you can request a refund, but as our policy is stating it is also the our discretion to process a refund.
you: http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/li...30019.page#top
you: Process a refund.
Adrian: As I stated before, we are not able to offer a refund.
Adrian: Is there anything else that I can assist you with?
you: This chat text goes viral.
you: Thanks

EA games is having the worst PR disaster out of any game company I've ever seen.

They need to do an emergency recall and refund and relaunch.