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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

#341

Post by fooey »

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.

The answer is neither.

They've already ruined their "second day" sales, and they have the money for their uninformed first day buyers already. Their best option is to ignore the pleb's while demand dies off enough that their existing infrastructure is adequate

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#342

Post by pyre »

ekianjo wrote: post #333
mmanfrin wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Wright become the largest shareholder of EA as a result of the takeover Sources?

From Wikipedia[1]:

  > The company's IPO took place in 1995. In 1997, after
  > setbacks on a series of secondary titles, Braun and
  > Wright sold Maxis to Electronic Arts for US$120
  > million in stock. The deal made Braun the largest
  > shareholder in EA at the time.
Not Wright, but a result of the purchase.

Also from Wikipedia[2]:

  > Maxis went public in 1995 with revenue of US$38 million.
  > The stock reached $50 a share and then dropped as Maxis
  > posted a loss. EA bought Maxis in June 1997.
and

  > It was a difficult idea to sell to EA, because
  > already 40% of Maxis's employees had been laid
  > off.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Braun

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#343

Post by networked »

networked wrote: post #58
TillE wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, there's a reason. Like Diablo III, the point is that it's effectively impossible to crack. With enough processing offloaded to the server, would-be pirates need to write something that's almost a whole new game. 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 Kickstart…

>Like Diablo III, the point is that it's effectively impossible to crack. With enough processing offloaded to the server, would-be pirates need to write something that's almost a whole new game. I agree that this is a strong deterrent but given how even MMORPG servers have been reversed engineered [1] it's not impossible. If SimCity proves as enduring and as desirable as WoW we may well see it coupled with a LinCity-…

I've got to point out that my previous remark about a LinCity-NG back end was made half-jokingly and now that I've noticed that's not really obvious it's too late to go back and edit the comment. The difference between how your city is represented in SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4, on which LinCity-NG is based, and the new SimCity is quite profound and I thought I'd explain it further.

First, the new layout engine finally allows you to construct roads at arbitrary angles and not just along the axes. This makes it fundamentally incompatible with the old grid-based map format used in SimCity since version one with few alternations [1]. Then there's the agent model of economics [2], a change from previous games' broad statistical model, that seems to be deeply integrated with the game's visualization.

[1] The biggest change was likely the introduction of varying terrain height in SimCity 2000.

[2] The developers give a brief explanation in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz-UGPRilUE. Looks like they've done some pretty interesting things with it.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#344

Post by cantankerous »

LandoCalrissian wrote: post #287
roc wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 shed a tear for Westwood studios.

"A Tear?" I'm still in mourning.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#345

Post by jasonm23 »

jlgreco wrote: post #327
Steko wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how the anti-government mindset even blames greed based failures of private industry on the government.

I love how the pro-government mindset sees even casual jokes at the expense of governments as "blaming the government".

I love how anti-government mindset even assumes those, who couldn't give a monkey's, are pro-government.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#347

Post by throwaway420 »

The programmers will probably be thrown under the bus for this instead of the suits who dictated the game's stupid social direction and always-on DRM, but I'm glad that this game is so far looking like an epic failure. Gaming companies need to be punished in the marketplace for rampant stupidity.

They deserve this game to flop, and it's good for gaming as a whole if this is an epic failure so EA will learn a lesson.

(Though I have doubts that a company as thick-headed as EA will learn anything positive from this)

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#348

Post by estel »

johnward wrote: post #313
estel wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, slightly less cynically, demand is always orders of magnitude higher for the first week or two after release, so it's only a short term investment in servers if they can be merged later.

The point is at some point they could pull the plug. I still play older version of SimCity to this day.

Sure they could. But if I get £40 of value from my game before they do, I can live with that. It's not ideal, but it doesn't make it a poor purchase.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#349

Post by bluedanieru »

caligo wrote: post #92
res0nat0r wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there was a big server meltdown during the Diablo 3 launch, is this the same thing? I'm not sure how long the Sim City servers have been down but is this just initial launch problems? I'm surprised Amazon has done this as they didn't do the same for D3. How long have logins been totall down for now? Also I think it would be helpful for reviews like this on Amazon and Spore to restrict the reviews to only verified…

I played Diablo 3 quite soon after launch and while there were "hiccups" (my character would occasionally jump around due to lag) I could connect fairly quickly to a server. From the reviews the Sim City servers seem to be overloaded much more than D3 servers were. The always connected to the internet aspect was bad for D3 and it seems it is even worse for Sim City. If I remember correctly, Blizzard had legal problem…

I agree with you in principle but I will suggest that titles which are overly-burdened with bullshit DRM will tend to be less important to the cultural record. I think that's the case here.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#350

Post by raylu »

PeterisP wrote: post #285
VMG wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't Steam also DRM and hugely successful and very popular with the gaming community?

Steam also presents a risk, but it's at least actively working to make it less bad for the consumer: 1) You can play most of games offline if you have a flaky connection; 2) They don't have a standard practice of turning off servers to 'obsolete' games, unlike EA. The Steam games are expected to work as long as Steam itself works; but SimCity most likely won't work much longer after the next SimCity is released, as w…

EA is also actively working on making things less bad by provisioning more hardware and disabling "non-critical" features.

DRM is DRM. People only get angry when things don't work, with the occasional philosophical argument thrown in to prove a point after the fact.

Steam gets less hate only because their servers have better uptime, but the hate towards EA comes in the form of a philosophical argument about how DRM is fundamentally broken.

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