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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

#421

Post by roc »

sshumaker wrote: post #265
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…

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.

I wasn't remotely talking about money; about why Maxis sold, whether they had to or anything along those lines. You're projecting an argument I never made.

I'm talking purely about the games and the people who make them.

EA buys studios and squeezes them. Why the studios subjected themselves to it is irrelevant to the fact that it happened. Repeatedly. Pretty much non-stop since Trip walked out the door. EA's long-standing treatment of their employees and the properties they owned, in the pursuit of a release schedule that burned out both in short order, is not revisionist history. It is EA's history.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#422

Post by radiac »

raylu wrote: post #353
adeaver wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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…

> If I take my laptop to the coffee shop without wireless I can still play Portal and Anno 2070. Unless you bought Portal on Steam and didn't sign in when you had an internet connection.

While that is a valid general criticism of Steam, they do provide an offline mode, which the new Sim City does not. Personally I prefer Steam to the previous alternative of having to leave the CD in the drive, or using a dodgy no-cd patch - but that's getting off topic.

The DRM strategy in Sim City is not the same as Steam, and cannot really be compared. EA are forcing unnecessary always-online features into what most people expect to be a single player game, preventing it from being played offline at all, in a thinly veiled attempt to prevent piracy and resale. That would be bad enough, but what makes it utterly unacceptable is that they haven't provided the infrastructure to support it in the short term, and clearly don't have the business model required to support it beyond the first few years.

Why anyone would knowingly support this business practice at all is beyond me, let alone for a game which has had such dubious pre-release reviews and is now essentially unplayable.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#423

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#424

Post by pointernil »

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…

True.

Yay! The Big-Enterprison teaches the youth VERY effectively why it scks by destroying their fun* with games ... this time: Simcity.

Is this "disaster" some sort of an ideological paradox intervention?

How bad can this get? I mean how do you manage to fail at such scale with a brand like this. Don't they need the money anymore? Don't they want it?

Interesting.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#425

Post by mpyne »

dpiers wrote: post #372
yarou wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa, Lockheed. Talk about a complete shift in career(s)...though I suppose programming UAVs is in some perverse way reminiscent of game programming. :)

Former game-dev here: Simulation programming is one of the most viable exits for developers looking to get away from the game space.

Thankfully so... I once ran an Ohio-class SSBN aground in a channel in a loss-of-all-possible-NAVAIDS casualty. Luckily it was in a simulator (unluckily, our bosses were there to see it happen).

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#426

Post by ianstallings »

Steko wrote: post #277
Alex3917 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I feel bad for the game devs who got to see their hard work turn into something they don't intend." On the contrary, this is by far the most realistic simulation of working for government that's ever been created.

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

Greed in government and greed in private industry are interchangeable. There isn't some magic fence between the two groups.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#428

Post by InvisibleCities »

junkilo wrote: post #234
pifflesnort wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was speaking more broadly. This isn't the first time EA has seriously blown a launch due to infrastructure issues I realize. EA's main infrastructure server team runs things like a pre-dotbomb forture 5. I'm slow to throw blame since EA's acquisitions chose to join EA. Technical Directors at Maxis are just as much to blame as well as product/project managers that fail to squeeze load testing into the busy schedule.…

>since EA's acquisitions chose to join EA.

Not quite correct. Maxis' shareholders decided to join EA; I doubt the average programmer, or even the average project manager or tech lead had any say in the process whatsoever.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#429

Post by lmickh »

Goronmon wrote: post #401
VMG wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The main difference is that Steam's DRM, if it requires an online connection, only requires it in order to start the game up. Once you are in-game, you aren't booted from the game if you lose your connection while playing. That isn't the case when playing games like SimCity and Diablo 3. Though, it SimCity's case it seems to be worse as I've heard people losing saves occasionally. I don't remember too many people los…

That is not true of all Steam games. Some games that rely on Steamworks will fail when they lose connection. Others have no real DRM at all. The executables can be run completely independent of Steam.

Spend a year or more in a local without consistent internet access and Steam's solution is not nearly as rosy. Putting Steam in offline mode requires that your first make an internet connection to cache. Even then after a few days, the cache expires and you have to be able to connect again.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#430

Post by darkarmani »

mpyne wrote: post #425
dpiers wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former game-dev here: Simulation programming is one of the most viable exits for developers looking to get away from the game space.

Thankfully so... I once ran an Ohio-class SSBN aground in a channel in a loss-of-all-possible-NAVAIDS casualty. Luckily it was in a simulator (unluckily, our bosses were there to see it happen).

Your sextant wasn't working?
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