Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#301

Post by vacri » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 1:06 AM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #269

goatforce5 wrote: post #49

Where's Steve Jobs when you need him? > Steve Jobs summoned the MobileMe team to the Town Hall > auditorium on Apple’s Cupertino campus for an obscenity- > laden dressing down. ‘You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,’ > he told them. ‘You should hate each other for having let > each other down.’ Then he named a new executive on the spot > to run the team.” http://macdailynews.com/2011/05/08/steve-jobs-to-those-respo...

Sorry, but no. I should not hate people because we weren't able to develop another new product that made you another billion. That's not a healthy work/life balance, that's a cult.

Nice how it works, eh? Product is good, love Jobs because he created the conditions to make it. Product is bad, hate the team that let Jobs down, because we know he's only ever involved in the good stuff.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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Post by sehugg » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 1:07 AM UTC

roc wrote: post #162

Irregardless wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would like to have seen SimMars (and SimCastle).

http://www.shacknews.com/article/60839/new-images-of-maxis-c...

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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Post by overgard » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 1:07 AM UTC

I wish I had read about this before I bought the game. I feel screwed over, I would have never bought the game if I knew it was like this.

There's something the game industry doesn't get in their zeal for control over users. (And lets be clear, this is about control, not just about piracy.) Here's what the game industry doesn't get: your barrier to entry is already exceptionally high. You might be able to get away with this in the short term, but it's a bad long term proposition, because I'm almost always going to choose convenience over quality (and I'm not alone). Asking me to pay $60, wait for a 12GB download, and have a very powerful rig is already a huge stretch. When you factor this mess in it's just not worth my time. I'd rather go get an indie game, or play a flash game. It's just not worth my time to deal with this, even if the game itself is impressive.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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Post by supercoder » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 1:07 AM UTC

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…

Absolutely none of this is going to happen.

They'd just see this as an issue with the server infrastructure , not the game. They'll just get more servers online, people will start to play and then the complaining will die down.

I dont think it will hurt their sales as much as you're implying anyway. I've just purchased it, knowing about the server issues, but also knowing it's going to come good soon enough.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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Post by aiwinters » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 1:15 AM UTC

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.

I agree with you that adding a bunch of servers looks like the simpler (cheaper, in terms of Net Present Value) option. But I worry that however they've set it up is just not horizontally scalable.

They say that a large bunch of the simulation runs on their servers. And that each city is connected (via the graph) to every other city. What if they haven't built in clean partitioning? If cities really do interact with every other city, and they've haven't already seriously planned how to horizontally scale, they're hosed.

If it were just a matter of adding more hosts, wouldn't they have done that by now? Surely you over-provision for launch and then scale down once the first sales are over and people's interest dies down.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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Post by degenerate » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 1:15 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #245

scarlson wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You weren't playing Diablo 3 at release then. Give EA time and Sim City will stabilize as well as D3 has, either because they've expanded hardware, or shrunk their user base.

Well I was. But my point is that it was a hit-or-miss. I managed to play without problems but I had friends who could not connect. SimCity is not like that. SimCity just does not work at all.

On the flip side, I've had friends playing simcity just fine. So, yeah.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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Post by dylangs1030 » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 1:19 AM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #69

ghshephard wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thinking goes - without DRM, some large number, X % of the games are just copied instead of purchased. With DRM, close to 0% of the the games are copied, but some large number Y % of the games are no longer purchased because people either are (A) Philisophically opposed to DRM, (B) Want to be able to play the game offline, or now, (C) Can't play the game because the DRM breaks it. The balancing act, here, is how…

A lot of games are copied, but it's a fallacy to assume that pirating a game means you won't buy it, or that attempting to pirate a game and being prevented (by DRM or some other means) means you'll buy it instead. In college I pirated games quite a bit. I never bought one, nor would I have.

That's true, but it's not what he was talking about. He wasn't talking about "one download, one lost sale" mentalities. He was talking about revenue loss in general. And if it's possible to pirate a game, you will lose some revenue from that. It might not mean every act of piracy is a lost sale, and it might not mean the game has a net revenue loss due to piracy. But there will be some revenue loss somewhere.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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Post by dylangs1030 » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 1:20 AM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #95

ghshephard wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I totally appreciate that - and, those people who would never have purchased the game in the first place, but copy it, provide some good word of mouth advertising for the game. The thing is though, if the number gets high enough, let's say 95% of people just copy the game (not unlikely in the age of torrents) and only 5% purchase it - might not be enough to fund a AAA game, whose budgets now run in the 100s of mi…

I agree. I do think the effect of piracy on a company's bottom line is overstated in just about every case. It's easy for us an the HN community (generally pretty intelligent and technically inclined) to forget that downloading a torrent isn't the simplest thing in the world, particularly the lengths you need to go to in order to get some pirated games to even function properly.

It's incredibly simple to download a torrent. My non-technical parents have done it in the past, without asking me how to.

In fact, from your desktop, it takes less than seven steps total to download and watch a Full HD movie of your choosing from the pirate bay.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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Post by badloginagain » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 1:23 AM UTC

pifflesnort wrote: post #190

junkilo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some places in EA are amazing places to work at. Others have challenges. They aren't the only game company that has seen studios do sub-standard work after being acquired.

You're seriously blaming this on Maxis ? I think the respective records of EA and a pre-EA Maxis ought to provide ample evidence of the likely culprit here.

Are you forgetting Spore? It was Will's baby, and it sucked.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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Post by dylangs1030 » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 1:25 AM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #77

ineedtosleep wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've seen pirated copies of (single-player only) BF3. What about the DRM is so different between that and Sim City?

Imagine one as a gate keeper and one as a patrol. In one you need to get past the gate keeper. In the other you need to be constantly vigilant everywhere because the code is fully DRM integrated.

Games that utilize internet connectivity for DRM only can simply fake the internet connection.

On Steam, this is done by tricking the copy of the game that the .dlls and relevant Steam .exe are running and everything is in order. Comparatively trivial to do, and these games are cracked very quickly.

However, games like Simpsons Tapped Out, Sim City, etc. go a step further and prevent you from playing without an internet connection. This means that instead of just needing to fool the game initially and cruise from there, you can't just surgically remove the DRM. It's too integrated into the back-end code. The only solution is to fake a server. Much more difficult.