221–230 of 452 posts
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One-time cost vs. ongoing cost for years to come? It's not as simple as you make it out to be.
yeah it. EA shuts down the servers when they are tired of paying for them. Game dies. Sim City get puts on madden schedule.
Fuck you EA - you're disappointing my inner child!
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I don't think you're adding clarity here. People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copies. There is no technical reason for its absence. The cloud based stuff sounds great, and if it were an optional extra that was unavailable at launch due to technical difficulties, I doubt you'd see a hundredth as much bad PR.
>People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copies. There is no technical reason for its absence. I see this sentiment expressed pretty often, but in this case it seems flawed. From what I understand, you can't build a city that does everything, instead you rely on the other cities in your 'region.' The new Simcity is no more single player than Wor…
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Originally they told us quite a bit of logic was done on their servers. But then they announced that Diablo 3 would be playable offline on the PlayStation 4. Now I don't know what to believe. Could it be it was all just talk to stop us from trying?
Or that the PS4 version is the first variant that has enough functionality built in for it to be playable offline.
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Isn't: > We can argue about whether these things should be computed and stored in the cloud, but I think there is a plausible, if imperfect, argument for doing so Conceivably true? We could be in a world with no DRM, but there would still be a market trend moving games towards a more social, connected and integrated experience; and some developers will be looking at ways to fundamentally build their new games in a wa…
No. One thing is to offer a "social mode", even to push it hard in terms of marketing or menu placement or whatever, another to require a connection at all times, even in "sandboxed mode" where you're not going to interact with anyone else -- which is completely preposterous, and it's done only because of DRM. If the problem was "going social", you'd see more p2p and lan-gaming features, rather than "let's all connec…
this is not preposterous at all. if all the simulation happens on the server side, its not necessarily trivial to have that run on the client. maybe the server requires unix. maybe the server requires an oracle database.
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…
Is the auth space something a startup could occupy? "Easy DRM/Auth for games that doesn't suck?"
Amazon is still selling the physical version. Why would they pull the digital download and not the physical copy? Is it because there are different people responsible for it?
I thought it might be an automatic block based on 1-star reviews, but both products have the same 88% 1-star reviews right now. Digital: 765/866 = 88.3% DVD: 912/1038 = 87.9%
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Apple seems to still be doing alright selling digital music, and they voluntarily stopped using DRM.
Apple didn't voluntarily stop using DRM; they convinced the labels to stop requiring it. Piracy isn't Apple's concern, but the user experience is. This is in service of saying that DRM isn't in the user's best interest and even big companies that care about user experience don't like DRM. Apple didn't ship DRM on its OSes when they were DVD based either. Yes they probably lost some sales due to piracy, but not having…
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Maxis has totally ignored the issue. Look at their Reddit AMA when nearly every question was regarding this, and they didn't even acknowledge it. Perhaps they were under legal obligation or pressure from EA, but I find it hard to feel sympathy.
It is incredibly likely they were forbidden by management from answering those questions.
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…
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.
Digital Restrictions Management = Defective by Design.