Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 2:41 AM UTC

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…

Post by ekianjo » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 2:52 AM UTC

mmanfrin wrote: post #294

sshumaker wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's slightly revisionist history. EA bought Maxis when they weren't in great financial shape (it didn't help that basically every Friday was spent at the bar). It's true that the Sims was a huge success that EA didn't anticipate (they repeatedly tried to kill the project), but the jury is still out if Maxis would have survived long enough to release it without EA's funding and support.

EA bought Maxis when they weren't in great financial shape I'm not familiar with the specifics, but if Maxis was in such dire straits, why did Wright become the largest shareholder of EA as a result of the takeover? And his partner became CEO for a while.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 3:09 AM UTC

arrrg wrote: post #275

ariwilson wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Amazon stopped using DRM to have a competitive advantage versus Apple, the music companies went along because it gave them a real competitor to iTunes, and eventually Apple managed to renegotiate their contracts so they could also remove the DRM.

Juicy, juicy revisionist history!

Post by jaredmcateer » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 3:24 AM UTC

joelmichael wrote: post #278

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…

This predictably happens at the release of almost every anticipated game that requires a central server connection. There is initial downtime and lag, angry gamers write lots of horrible reviews, then things eventually get better and nobody cares anymore that it used to be broken.

Post by fooey » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 3:28 AM UTC

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…