Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

However, this isn't some cheap game, some small company, some inexperienced producers who didn't know what to expect. That their servers aren't up to the job is inexcusable, and clearly their fault.

Even if Origin has Ts & Cs that boil down to you don't actually have the right to play games you buy, even if you buy them on a disc - which I'm sure they do, how is this possibly legal? The game is unplayable, it's their fault and they could have made it work if they'd chosen to.

This is the future that big videogame companies are rushing to embrace, one where customers do not and cannot own games, merely rent them for an uncertain period. Indies and smaller studios with Kickstarter funding are going to continue eating a bigger part of their lunch.

Even in the best case scenario, where the servers all get fixed this evening and the game works flawlessly for everyone for a month straight, the damage to the game's name has been done. The meme is hatched: SimCity 2013 has a highly brittle dependency on poorly-planned cloud infrastructure.

There's a private region mode in the game (that you nonetheless can't use offline in the current architecture). EA needs to have Maxis crunch for the next couple of weeks to make this work offline. Yes, I've read the nebulous quotes about "part of the sim happening in the cloud." Whatever that is, they'll have to move it to the client.

Once offline play is possible, if EA wants any chance to make back its investment on this game, they're going to have to first promote the new offline mode, and then spend the next couple of months doing some post-launch rescoping of the multiplayer aspect. They can still make it work; it could still be fantastic – but they have to move fast.

It started with FPS mania... Then crazy DRM that destroyed your PC (Starforce I am looking to you).

Then... more crazy DRM! (SecuROM, that for example refused to launch Spore on dual-GPU laptops).

Then online only DRM...

Then DLC mania (Horse Armor, I am looking to you... unfortunately as the harbinger of something much worse past you).

Then Diablo III (and now SC5) managed to be the first games I don't want to play even borrowed, pirated or given to me. If someone give me a DIII CD, I won't even re-sell it and inflict something evil on someone, I will just throw it on the trash, because online-only DRM for Single Player game, transforming the game into a sort of cloud-based service, is one of the most evil things that companies could invent, specially because they can just yank the game from you when they wish (also you cannot have fun cheating alone or modding, cannot play when you are deployed in some war without internet on the HQ or live in the third world, cannot play if you deride EA/Activision/Ubisoft on the forums and they decide to ban you...)