Quip seen on Twitter [1]: "Disabling features of SimCity due to ineffective central infrastructure is probably the most realistic simulation of the modern city."
SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM
41–50 of 207 posts
Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM
#42> There's also the question of preserving gaming history. As we saw with THQ last month, publishers aren't immortal. They can die, and had THQ implemented always-online DRM in Darksiders II, all copies of that game might've died with it when the rights to the series weren't bought up by another publisher. That's the part that concerns me the most. I still install (and play) lots of old games on every computer I own -…
but piracy seems to be our only guaranteed method of preserving them You aren't going to pirate Sim City 5. This is the future of gaming. Companies are just going to avoid all the grief of piracy and weird DRM by either moving to locked-down platforms (iOS and consoles) or into games that have essential online components. It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. I'd love to by a game and install it on my PC without it taki…
> You aren't going to pirate Sim City 5.
If there's interest in it, it'll be done. The connections will be sniffed and reproduced and/or the online component will just be cracked out entirely, but if somebody wants to do it it will ultimately be done.
Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM
#43> There's also the question of preserving gaming history. As we saw with THQ last month, publishers aren't immortal. They can die, and had THQ implemented always-online DRM in Darksiders II, all copies of that game might've died with it when the rights to the series weren't bought up by another publisher. That's the part that concerns me the most. I still install (and play) lots of old games on every computer I own -…
but piracy seems to be our only guaranteed method of preserving them You aren't going to pirate Sim City 5. This is the future of gaming. Companies are just going to avoid all the grief of piracy and weird DRM by either moving to locked-down platforms (iOS and consoles) or into games that have essential online components. It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. I'd love to by a game and install it on my PC without it taki…
The simulation is client side. Regions and saves are server side, nothing else. It'll be cracked
Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM
#44I have been waiting to pay and play this for months now, even to the point of upgrading hardware. I was even part of the Beta.
Well I am going to vote with my dollars and not buy it. Probably ever. If it worked offline it would have been a different story.
Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an online game. Pirating it is about as feasible as running a pirate copy of google.com.
"It's an online game. Pirating it is about as feasible as running a pirate copy of google.com" What a silly, untrue statement. A better analogy would be "as feasible as running a copy of World of Warcraft offline", which people do.
Which in a way relates to Irregardless's post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5345217. One of my favorite MMO's Ragnarok Online won't get locked away and lost when Gravity decides to close it down, there are plenty of backends and open source projects that support the game.
Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM
#46It's an interesting case study. This happens with nearly every MMO and people grumble but accept it. Within a couple weeks, the server issues are mostly resolved and people don't think about it anymore. And yet, people are pissed about this. The fact that people see the game as single player seems to make a huge difference. It seems the lesson is that, if you want to do the always-on thing, you need to design your ga…
Server woes are a necessary evil with MMOs, and people buy the game knowing they'll have to deal with some amount of downtime due to maintenance, overcrowding or just plain growing pains. Try telling FPS players that their game will be unavailable every Tuesday morning for 6-12 hours and they'll probably riot -- that's standard downtime in the MMO world though.
No, that's actually standard WOW downtime. Check out Eve Online. They've been gradually decreasing downtime.
Last time I played, it was like 30 minutes every day, with 15 minutes just for the cluster to reboot (the client has a nice server status, with a countdown and ETA). Their goal was to reduce it to zero (it was 1 hour when I first started playing).
Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trouble downloading and installing the game, massive login queues (that recheck the queue once every 30 minutes), trouble creating cities, troubles loading creating cities, disconnections, features have been removed to help handle stress, etc. Basically, it's hard to get it downloaded and installed. If you do that, it's very difficult to login to play. If you manage that, it's very difficult to do the tutorial or cla…
They should probably have an "achievement" for passing each of those hurdles; turn the task of running a game into a game itself...
Achievements are disabled at the moment, so that wouldn't work either.
Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm mixed on this. I really dislike online DRM, but one of the greatest weaknesses of SimCity 4 was that the average home computer had no hope of simulating a large city. This is still true today - while most computers could handle the graphics engine behind it, the simulation engine would still eat your machine for lunch. Moving the city simulation server-side certainly has its justifications - it opens up the field…
That's a smokescreen, there's no way they are offloading any significant amount of processing to remote servers, compared to the local CPU power. The economics just can't work.
Indeed. It is definitely not possible that they are offloading a home PC worth of compute power per user on the server side. The idea is just laughable, at least at this stage.
The problem is that EA keeps producing games, and people keep buying them. Until everyone just says screw EA and stops buying any of their games it won't matter.
Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM
#49If they had called this Sim City Online and marketed as not the next Sim City, but more of an MMO like Ever Quest, Guild Wars, and Star Wars Galaxies would be people be complaining as much if they knew they had to be online to play it.
Sim City 4, 2000, and the original still run perfect and are extremely fun to play. Sim City 4 is on Steam even making it easy to get right now. I'm tempted to pick that up since I have not played it. I loved the original and 2000 though.
Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM
#50I don't actually think this is a danger of always on DRM more growing pains from an industry (gaming) that is learning how to build infrastructure that can scale to the size of their audience. Games are going to move toward becoming services just like any popular web app you use in your day to day life and I am not mad about that. I don't ever give a second though to whether Pivotal Tracker, Evernote or Flickr will be around in a few years, I accept the thought that may not be and use the tools because I enjoy them.
Gaming as a medium is trying to evolve and find a business model that can allow them to scale games to audiences that are bigger and trying to make them more complex without having to tap into all the power your computer / console may have. I have worked in the game industry and while I can support people being upset and I am more interested in how this impacts the type of gameplay experiences we have in the future.
I would be interested in seeing startups spring up around supporting cloud infrastructure and analytics for game companies. Sort of like an amazon for Game Devs