351–360 of 452 posts
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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 would have fought to develop a working offline mode from the beginning
SimCity 2000/3000/4 still work perfectly, and are available for free.
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So your argument is really that DRM is ok as long as the user knows about it in advance?
'web' apps are expected to work on the 'web'. It kind of goes without saying that it there is no network it can't make whatever calls it needs to in order to load data. Games are not generally expected to require a network connection. If I take my laptop to the coffee shop without wireless I can still play Portal and Anno 2070. Not so with the new SimCity. Not to mention, there is an expectation that if you buy a gam…
Unless you bought Portal on Steam and didn't sign in when you had an internet connection.
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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.
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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.
One of my biggest disappointments with the games industry is that those editors never really made their way into the industry at large. One of my greatest hopes after Spore launched was that some company would license those editors and actually build a good game around them. A Dungeon-Keeperesque game with fully editable creatures and dungeon design was a particular dream. Sadly, it never really caught on, and Spore looks to be a mostly dead end.
How is it 2013 and NFL 2K5 is still the best NFL sim?
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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…
The answer was discovered long ago: online play. Starcraft had this interesting concept: you could enter a key to play in single-player mode, and even have some fun playing against the AI, but to play on Battle.net you needed a unique key. Online play is a whole different level of exciting from offline play, and Battle.net makes Blizzard a ton of money. Likewise with XBox Live for Microsoft. That EA failed to realize…
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 wi…
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Also known as the Diablo III strategy.
Diablo III was (I think -- not like I've played Sim City yet) worse because the online AH was built into the gameplay Imagine if WoW's loot had been designed so that raid loot would NEED to be traded via a real money AH with Blizzard taking a cut. Of course for all we know Sim City will turn out to have that kind if BS too.
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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…
My own personal anecdote is that most of my Bay-Area game-industry contacts were at Maxis: around 8-9 of them. And precisely none of them are still with EA today. Some have left to freelance, some to do indie games, some to do regular tech jobs outside the game industry entirely (e.g. would rather work for Lockheed than EA).