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Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#161

Post by mmatants »

fusiongyro wrote: post #100
bearmf wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that it is not only impossible to crack, it is now impossible to play as well. Unplayable games are impossible to crack, but this does not make them any less absurd. DRM has come to its logical and absurd conclusion, it seems.

It worked out the same way with music. For a short time the labels were experimenting with selling CDs that weren't actually audio CDs, but had been damaged in various ways to make them unplayable on a computer. The result of that experiment speaks for itself. Hopefully it will play out the same way here.

The result is that we are increasingly switching to renting our music via services like Rdio and Spotify.

And I can't say that this trend is all bad. I know what I pay for (temporary access), and I'm OK with that.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#162

Post by roc »

Irregardless wrote: post #126
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #42

I feel bad for the game devs who got to see their hard work turn into something they don't intend. I suppose this is a great advertising technique for small firms, startups, indie shops, etc. "Don't want this[ http://amazon-pulls-sim-city ] to happen? Work for our small team. We won't destroy your work." I know it's standard to say "you get a part in the decisionmaking process!" That's part of it. But a lot of people…

EA has a reputation for being more akin to a sweatshop than a place where passionate people work on things they love, and it's been that way for many years now. I do feel bad for anyone who works in that type of environment, but I don't think many (if any) of their employees are under the impression that their work will be lauded by adoring fans. Gamers resent everything that EA stands for -- especially their constan…

> "Takeover by EA is usually considered a death knell for game studios..."

Further to this point: Maxis, makers of Sim City, were notable for a long time as being the glaring exception when it came to EA's habit of buying and squeezing studios to death.

But the writing was on the wall when THE SIMS hit so big and was.. "exploited"[1] so heavily.

And when Will left... well, it's just flat-out inconceivable that anyone remained naive about what EA was going to get up to.

[1] http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/05

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#164

Post by pdubs »

AlexDanger wrote: post #120
mortenjorck wrote: post #37

EA needs to pivot this game, fast. 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 cur…

Remember EA is a business, not an offshoot of Reddit/HN. Imagine you're the SimCity product manager and the choice was between a massive refactor or provisioning a bunch of new servers. Which would you choose? I'd love to agree with you, but I just dont think its plausible.

One-time cost vs. ongoing cost for years to come? It's not as simple as you make it out to be.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#165

Post by Cardeck1 »

jfim wrote: post #150
mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the case here. The game does significant processing on their servers, to make it useless as soon as they turn their servers off, which AFAIK they haven't promised to keep up any certain amount of time.

Thanks for the clarification; it's pretty awful of them to have them have this copy protection mechanism and fail to allocate enough server resources for people to be able to play the game they legitimately purchased. It sounds as if some random MBAs said that they really need that server-side undefeatable copy protection, then balked at the price of actually purchasing enough resources for it and decided to skimp on…

No, it actually doesn't sound like some random MBAs.Are you one of those guys that blame MBAs for everything?The truth is we don't know what actually happened there.We'll have to wait for EA's reply on this one.It will be hard for them to recover after a huge mistake/strategy like this.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#166

Post by aqme28 »

ineedtosleep wrote: post #74
cryptoz wrote: post #18

This could be a very big moment. EA is selling a completely broken product - and I mean that from the perspective of the average consumer, not the nerd who thinks all DRM is broken - and they're doing it for absolutely no reason . If this lasts long enough and gets enough press, it could actually be a turning point against DRM like this. That would be so wonderful.

EA have already launched a product like this: Battlefield 3. It was pretty unstable in the first weeks and the game required an internet connection and login to even play the game. Since it's a PC FPS that's not CoD, it didn't get too much press. I, for one, will not trust another game a DRM-laden game again due to BF3 and SimCity 2013 just reinforces that.

Battlefield 3 is a bad comparison because it's intrinsically a multiplayer franchise. No one complains that they need an internet connection to play World of Warcraft, because it's expected.

Additionally, BF3 had an offline single-player mode. SimCity could have an offline single-player mode, but elected not to.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#167

Post by cbs »

spartango wrote: post #81

Can we talk about this more clearly? This isn't strictly "evil DRM" as people are highlighting. Unlike some other games, it's not like SimCity is just phoning home to figure out if it is licensed or not, and preventing unlicensed copies. SimCity depends on EA/Maxis' server infrastructure for a great deal of storage and computation related to the macro-scale components of each game. Not only is city state synced there…

Regardless, the use of the cloud in this game is for more than just to deter pirates. That much is clear.

So you're right that its not "evil DRM" in the traditional sense, that shit failed and publishers moved on years ago. Online components, and preferable mandatory online components is the new AAA game anti-piracy, anti-secondary-market strategy.

EA could have designed a more resilient architecture without sacrificing the multi-player/social aspects. But they didn't, why not?

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#168

Post by trothamel »

To me, the problems we see today will pale in comparison with the problems people will experience years from now. If the game is unplayable today, what will it be like when EA decides that keeping the servers running is unprofitable, and turns those servers off?

(I think there's some sort of analog to historical preservation of art and buildings here.)

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#170

Post by daurnimator »

Bud wrote: post #91
amitparikh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this just a technical error (bug) that is a game dev's (or infrastructure engineer's) responsibility? I understand the frustration at the DRM concept, but you can't blame this on the larger entity as a whole when it was likely just a bug in some code or a small oversight. Things were clearly working when it was in beta.

a) When it was in beta, there was presumably much less server load. b) The fact that a small bug in the unnecessary server/DRM part of the game could take the whole game down like this is precisely the point. You can certainly blame the whole entity for deciding to require a net connection and a server even for single-player use of the game.

but the beta had the same issues, they were never fixed before release.
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