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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

#361

Post by plorkyeran »

raylu wrote: post #357
betterunix wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How does Blizzard make money from Battle.net?

Only indirectly. Under 20% of Starcraft's sales occurred within a year of release, so I think it's fairly safe to say that the vast majority would not have happened if bnet did not exist.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#362

Post by sirclueless »

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-…

It's not the engine that needs to be reverse engineered. It's the balance and legitimacy. If you offload all the RNG and cause equipment to be controlled by a central entity, then it becomes both opaque and a single-point-of-failure. People know EVERYTHING about Diablo 2 drops, because you have the machine logic right there. Not true about, say, World of Warcraft, where people know a lot of macro statistics about drop rates and so on through crowd-sourced data gathering, but they don't know a lot of things, like boss pathing rules and event scripting.

Running a private server for a MMO has a ton of fundamental barriers. 1) Players don't get timely balance updates. 2) Players have no confidence that admins won't hack/give away items/cause crazy events etc. (Central point of authority = central point of corruption. Even if there don't happen to be any game-breakingly generous admins on a server, you can't signal that reliably to potential players.) 3) Servers may disappear. Since info is central, but private servers may fold under takedown notices, owners running out of money, technical problems, lack of other players, or anything else, players can't have trust that their time spent will have lasting rewards. Credibility is almost impossible to build.

Basically, by making games reliant on a central authority, you force the element of trust and credibility into the picture. Usually the only server with any credibility is the one run by the game company itself, since ideally you can trust that their actions will be in the best long-term interests of their game and audience. (EA in particular lost that trust a long time ago, I haven't bought a game of theirs in a LONG time. But Valve, or Blizzard, and even Ubisoft to a lesser extent still have that credibility.)

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#363

Post by scotty79 »

TillE wrote: post #35
cryptoz wrote: post #18

This could be a very big moment. EA is selling a completely broken product - and I mean that from the perspective of the average consumer, not the nerd who thinks all DRM is broken - and they're doing it for absolutely no reason . If this lasts long enough and gets enough press, it could actually be a turning point against DRM like this. That would be so wonderful.

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…

Then when company goes belly up games die. Like Hellgate London multiplayer.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#364

Post by pdwetz »

raylu wrote: post #350
PeterisP wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Ultimately I think users are pragmatic; if DRM stays out of the way they won't care, and that's by-and-large how Steam is for most people. They also seem to focus on value-add items, such as being able to install (easily!) on multiple computers, operating systems, etc., whereas EA and other companies seem to provide more pain than pleasure. If a company appears to be trying to help people, they'll lovingly hand over their money. If a company seems to be only interested in their wallets, twitter and message boards will not be kind.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#365

Post by sirclueless »

betterunix wrote: post #279
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…

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…

Well, I understand why they did what they did. It joins a category of games like Diablo 3, where the basic value proposition for the purchaser is fundamentally single player, but the value proposition for the developer follows all the network-effect-leveraging growth-dependent online product tropes. Diablo 3 is especially starkly obvious: the auction house is where Blizzard makes its money post-sale, so they want people playing online. They think it will be better for players in the long run if they are involved in the social and online elements, and they might even be right, but they correctly surmise that unless they force people to be online, people will choose the easy route and play single player.

I don't particularly think they are wrong. For example, after a while, the ridiculous ease of obtaining hacked items ruined single-player for me -- it would be more fun I'm sure to have to work for everything, but I don't have the willpower or incentive to do that unless it's forced on me.

Look at Minecraft. There are multi-hundred player online servers that do great business by providing a persistent world where people have to work for things, making their money by giving diamonds and perks to donors. Not many people play single-player religiously. It's fun for a while, but the main demographic that plays offline is almost certainly the hopeless creatives. (And there's a lot more people who are into competitive/cooperative rat races than are endowed with both a self-motivating sense of design and a bunch of free time.)

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#366

Post by [deleted] »

DigitalSea wrote: post #264
s3graham wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because every hour after release that it's not-yet-cracked equates to a substantial improvement in lifetime revenue. They're not stupid, they know it's getting cracked. It's just a play for more time.

Maybe the case for non EA games, but considering people won't get to play Simcity within the next 2 weeks or so, there'll be a cracked version out by then. EA have brought themselves nothing but trouble in this situation and being the out-of-touch company they are, they deserve every loss of sale they get.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#367

Post by derefr »

rurounijones wrote: post #290
chongli wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea here is to force you to be reliant on the network; to move the processing onto their servers. SimCity isn't a normal game, it's a SaaS game.

SaaS Game, very well put! Do we need a new acronym for games that required black-box server side components (Not just DRM but entire chunks of game code) not controlled by the consumer? GaaS? (Game as a Service)? Ubisoft did the same thing with the last silent Hunter game IIRC.

80% of mobile games are already precisely this, without requiring the coinage of a special term for it.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#368

Post by jiggy2011 »

DigitalSea wrote: post #264
s3graham wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because every hour after release that it's not-yet-cracked equates to a substantial improvement in lifetime revenue. They're not stupid, they know it's getting cracked. It's just a play for more time.

Maybe the case for non EA games, but considering people won't get to play Simcity within the next 2 weeks or so, there'll be a cracked version out by then. EA have brought themselves nothing but trouble in this situation and being the out-of-touch company they are, they deserve every loss of sale they get.

This isn't like normal DRM, key parts of the game logic and performed server side so you would need to reimplement the server in order to crack it.

Think of it like trying to get a "crack" for 37s Basecamp or similar.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#369

Post by derefr »

ryguytilidie wrote: post #257
anon1385 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your argument is really that DRM is ok as long as the user knows about it in advance?

Mayyybe I'm misreading your argument since I've read it about 5 times and am not sure if you're serious, but web apps need the web to work by design, why would a single player game need the web to work?

> why would a single player game need the web to work

For the same reason Siri needs a connection to work: there's a lot of heavy processing going on, which your client device just couldn't handle even if it wanted to, that is being offloaded to a cluster somewhere instead. In Siri's case, it's linguistic analysis; in SimCity's case, it's inter-city traffic-flow, economy, and other expansive high-granularity world-simulation tasks.

...or, at least, that's what EA's engineering claimed at some point. To still be charitable to them, but to temper this with pragmatism a bit, I don't think there's really that much difficult processing going on; I imagine it was more that high-end gaming PCs could run everything client-side, but the low-to-medium-end PC market--from which Maxis pulls the lion's share of its sales volume--couldn't.

Shoving the processing server-side means everyone can get the effect of throwing a 3GHz Xeon at their world-simulation, and the total amount of processing required can be decreased dramatically by using player's real cities to neighbor other real cities for inter-city world-sim calculations, instead of having to simultaneously synthesize the behavior of 8+ AI cities to interact with each real one.

To put it another way, I imagine it would be very hard to market a game where the core feature ("new, more granular, more realistic simulation!") degrades into non-existence on the average PC, thus rendering an upgrade from the previous version moot.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#370

Post by vor_ »

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…

That cartoon is about Bobby Kotick of Activision.
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