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SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

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Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#51

Post by bentcorner »

jsnell wrote: post #23
potatolicious wrote: post #15

Earlier 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.

Plus, if that was truly the case then the economical thing to do would be to ship a SimCity server so that players could run their own regions at their own cost. It neatly answers some of the "how can I play this in 10 years" questions and yet allows for the supposed benefits of server-side simulation.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#52

Post by mikeash »

potatolicious wrote: post #29
mikeash wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this actually the case? I've seen a lot of people say it, but then I've also seen some people say that they were able to keep playing for considerable periods of time even while the servers were offline. It sounds like one of those things where marketing-speak got misinterpreted as a technical design that isn't actually how it's built, but I really haven't investigated besides reading comments.

It's tricky because of the lack of concrete information. IMO the claim is substantiated by the fact that they turned off the highest simulation speed in an effort to increase server capacity - so clearly the server is tied into the basic simulation to some degree. How deep the ties go is hard to tell. If this was purely a DRM maneuver I highly doubt server capacity would be in any way tied to game speed.

That sounds to me like they're doing regular checkins (DRM-related, or stats, or autosaves, or something) whose frequency depend on the game speed. I just saw a review[1] which indicated that the game ran fastest when it couldn't talk to the servers.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/chris-kluwes-simcity-5-review...

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#53

Post by jwr »

I treat anything that is DRM-encumbered as a rental, and make buying decisions accordingly. It is not something I own, and I do not expect to be able to use it beyond a certain time horizon (a year or two).

Same goes for DRM-protected books or music.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#54

Post by adimitrov »

masklinn wrote: post #42
danielweber wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I fear the game might just in general not be good enough for this to happen. Replicated pirate servers barely work well enough for WoW, and that is a hugely successful, and arguably very good game.

I doubt SimCity 2013 is going to develop such a cult following to allow for these kinds of cracks.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#55

Post by danielweber »

papsosouid wrote: post #40
danielweber wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>moving to locked-down platforms (iOS and consoles) Where piracy is rampant?

I'll take your (and a few other sibling commenters') word for it.

That just means we'll be moving even more towards not having software that runs just on my hardware.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#56

Post by fennecfoxen »

danielweber wrote: post #21
ry0ohki wrote: post #14

Can someone confirm that the online mode offers nothing but DRM? The fact that they had to disable Cheetah speed makes me think they really are offloading some of the game simulations to the servers. It certainly feels like a much speedier game then SimCity 4 (when it works).

Parts of the game logic are run on the server. I don't expect more game companies to stay away from this; I expect them to do this a lot more for PC gaming. Probably not explicitly, but as much as people in /r/technology insists piracy doesn't matter, the companies continue to care. With online games, the need to worry about that largely evaporates. Instead, I expect companies to put in proper rate limiting, fallback…

"Parts of the game logic are run on the server." By which they mean: storage of save-games, and resource trading with your city-neighbors.

That is ALL.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#57

Post by r0s »

danielweber wrote: post #33
Irregardless wrote: post #28

> 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…

That is a huge barrier to entry for small developers, so indy games will always be sans-online DRM for the most part.

These games are developed on open PC systems, so that's always going to be around too... your predictions for the future look hazy.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#58

Post by sbov »

Irregardless wrote: post #34
danielweber wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I'm tempted to believe that due to the simulation grunt work being done server-side. But people also said the same thing about WoW and Starcraft II, yet you can easily play either of those for free with fully functioning multiplayer (just not on Battle.net).

This is wrong. The simulation is not serverside. If you disconnect from the servers you can play your city all you want. The only serverside aspect is saves and social (including region play), which would be relatively easier to recreate.

Re: SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

#60

Post by jordan0day »

b3b0p wrote: post #49

If 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 hav…

This, exactly.

In another discussion on hn, someone was basically saying "no one acts so surprised when you can't access Facebook if your internet connection is down, why are they so ticked off here?" I'd argue that it's because most people have a reasonable expectation that a locally-installed, single-player game should work regardless of connectivity.

There may be potentially valid technical reasons why SimCity might need or even want a persistent connection, but you absolutely need to call that out.

With EA's record of shutting down still-active servers for the multi-player portions of games that were just a few years old, I would be very reticent to buy an EA product that required a server even for single-player mode.

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