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Well, predictably Sim City 5 is an absolute clusterfuck. Namely, no one can play it. The servers are shitting the bed and it's so bad that Amazon has stopped selling digital downloads of it.

if they're going to require constant internet connection, they should damn well have the servers ready to handle the load. I understand DRM, but this is just bullshit. There were a lot of times when I was without internet, but still had power to hook up my computer; with this latest batch of games, I wouldn't have been able to play things I paid for.

They think this is going to fight piracy? It's going to encourage it when people get fed up with the internet connection requirement, and just steal a copy with DRM disabled.

Actually no, they've finally come up with a method of DRM that works, namely, it's not on your computer. What you get on the SC5 disk is all the graphics, sounds, and other things, but you don't get the game engine. All critical calculations are carried out on EA's server farm and it pipes back what your game should display. In other words the core code of what makes Sim City 5 tick is never going to be in your hands. It can't be pirated. The downside is of course, you can never play it off line. Without a way to send and receive data from the servers the game is completely unplayable. The game is also un-moddable. One of SC4's greatest strengths was the mod community. As it is now there won't be an SC5 mod community. Sure, maybe some visuals though given EA's history even those might get you banned.

An ugly side effect of this is that cities are limited to 1/10th the size they were in SC4 to minimize the load on the servers. Hell, they already had to disable cheetah speed to try and lessen the load on them and they still aren't running reliably.

The big concern for me is the future. EA literally has total control over the game. When they come out with Sim City 6 or 2014 or whatever they call it what's to stop them from making it hard to play SC5? Reduce the size of the server farms, make it harder to connect, less stable, whatever. Hell, what's to stop them from saying, "Oh well SC5 has run its course and you need to buy SC6 to subsidize the huge server farms it takes to support these games. SC5 will be shut down in a month." Well, nothing. They can do it. Will they support SC5 for ten years? Hell no. Especially with no subscription model in place to keep generating revenue. The $60 you gave them at purchase is all the revenue they ever got. It's in their best interests to re-purpose those servers into a new game.

The real down side? People will still buy it, they'll still play it, and in the end the only thing EA will learn is that their customers are chumps.

They can stuff that whole gaming model. Aside from my point that not everyone always has an internet connection, your point was one that I'd already considered with ME3, namely that after a few years, they just won't have the servers running anymore, so good luck playing it again. So who's stealing from who, now?

I played SC1 for years; SC4 is still a great game, and I'll just be happy with that.

That's where I'm at. I don't want to support this kind of business model. I like the graphical upgrades that I'm seeing but everything else is just such the fucking antithesis of Sim City that I can't stomach it. Smaller cities? No offline play? No mods? Multiplayer? The fuck? This isn't an improvement on SC4, it's a completely different game parading around in Sim Cities skin.

And seriously, fuck DRM. How much is this costing EA? How much is it costing them to host this game on their servers and run those farms and internet connections and everything else? How big a bite is that taking out of their profit margin? I guaran-damn-tee you that they aren't improving their cash flow. They aren't preventing so much piracy as to sell enough games to make this a winning position. That's what I keep trying to tell people, they'd make more money simply by not wasting their time on DRM and making a good game. DRM isn't free, certainly not the degree we're seeing with games like ME3, Diablo 3, and SC5. How much money is it costing to do this, how many additional sales are they generating. That's my point, it costs them more to do this than they'll make in additional sales from stopping piracy. Most pirates aren't going to pay for this shit even if you make sure they can't play.

How about this, SC5 works fine offline, play how you want, do whatever you want, build big cities, all that shit. Then there's the multiplayer component, the one you can't get with a pirated game. Cities are smaller but you're online playing with friends. Incentivize it to discourage piracy and second hand purchases the way that ME2 did. Buy a legit copy or an online pass and get access to multiplayer, new buildings and services, maybe cloud backup for your cities in case your game dies. You know, shit that won't cost you even a fraction of what making everyone play on your servers all the time will. You're not going to stop piracy and you'll only piss your fans off, or you'll cost yourself so much money doing it that it's just flat out stupid. EA started off doing the second one and is now blending that with the last bit.

I give it a week before someone hacks their servers and steals the game engine.

We can hope. I haven't pirated a game I've genuinely wanted in a long time. This DRM has reached the point that I'd seriously consider pirating SC5 rather than pay for this bullshit. The irony is that if I did pirate it I'd be one of the few that could still play it in 10 years.

The funny thing is the Game industry is one of the least effected industries by piracy. Most people tend to buy rather than pirate games.

They make massive profits and often make more money than movies. There is no need to be this hard core about it.

They're hardcore about it because the people in charge have never had anyone sit them down and explain to them that a pirated copy of a game is not a lost sale. They think that if they could just stop piracy every pirated copy will instantly turn into a sale and it won't. In fact I'd be shocked if even 5% of pirates would actually buy a copy of the game if piracy isn't an option.

But they cling to that idiotic ideal and this is what we get. If they were smart they'd just save themselves the cost of DRM, and the cost of this DRM must be titanic, and call it a win or invest that back into the game to make it even better. You don't win by punishing people for buying the game, you incentivize it so that there is a clear benefit to buying the game as opposed to priacy.

I think th ebacklash against this is going to be huge and cost them money, they might not even break even on this game. That should discourage them in the future. Let your money talk people!!!

I'm starting to think this might just be EA's standard operating procedure. They know that launch will see tons of people all logging in simultaneously to play, probably more at once to play than any other time. Servers cost money. So instead of getting enough to handle launch week they just get what they figure they'll need in a month and let it all go to hell. After all, they've already got your money, and they refuse to give refunds, so what do they care if you can't play the game? We've taught them we're gullible chumps who'll put up with being royally buggered time and again so threats that, "We won't buy your next game!" are hollow and they know it. So they save themselves money on servers but knowingly not getting enough and just riding out the initial surge.

I only buy (and play) games I think are good. If I couldn't "test out" games, then there would have been a lot of lost sales in the past 10 years.

Piracy improves sales.

Here's my real concern, if things keep going the way they are we're going to see EA roll out a system where nothing is loaded on your system but the launcher. Your computer will just be a dumb terminal displaying the image sent to it from the server.

I doubt that will happen due to the high end costs on their end in running the server farms.

They're already running server farms for their DRM. It also completely seals the game. No piracy, no "lost" profits. They can even decide when it's time to turn a game off so they can bolster revenue in its successor. You can't trade the game or resell it because you don't own it, all you have is a log in tied to Origin. If they make a popular game even better! You'll pay $60 up front for the game then they can charge you $5 a month "maintenance" to keep playing multiplayer or whatever. At that point you have absolute control over the product. You really think that's not something EA wants? We're talking about a game where they've already started it. They've migrated the engine off your computer and to a server farm. All you've got is a renderer taking its orders from the server farm.