Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ign.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 207 posts

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

#81

Post by ryusage »

betterunix wrote: post #74
Irregardless wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Server woes are a necessary evil with MMOs" I am not sure that is true. What other than DRM stops people from setting up their own competing servers? What other than a lack of incentive for the game makers prevents community-run servers from interoperating, creating an enormous peer-to-peer universe?

As far as interoperating community-run servers: cheating is the first thing that comes to mind. A lot of restrictions in MMO's are not so much for DRM as they are for maintaining fairness in the game, or preventing people from destroying the in-game economy.

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

#82

Post by mynameisvlad »

svachalek wrote: post #70
mynameisvlad wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what would make it different from a regular SimCity game? The fact that it has the word online after it? That's a weak argument at best. They from the start called it a new game, not a sequel, and its been known for a long time that it would have the always-on component. The game was never meant to be a sequel. That's why it's calls SimCity and not SimCity 5. People just decide to interpret it as such even if its…

So you are arguing that "SimCity Online" does not sound different than a regular SimCity game, but "SimCity" does? Does not compute.

No I'm questioning why you are saying they should have come up with a different name like SimCity Online and start afresh when they did just that... But with the normal SimCity name. Maybe I didn't word it well, I'm running on 2 hours of sleep.

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

#83

Post by Negitivefrags »

betterunix wrote: post #74
Irregardless wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Server woes are a necessary evil with MMOs" I am not sure that is true. What other than DRM stops people from setting up their own competing servers? What other than a lack of incentive for the game makers prevents community-run servers from interoperating, creating an enormous peer-to-peer universe?

What other than DRM?

There is no DRM in an MMO. What stops you is the lack of them giving you the server software.

Facebook doesn't give you their server software either, would you call that DRM?

This is absolutely no different. Considering that a huge proportion of Hacker News is devoted to web based startups, you would think that this would be fairly obvious.

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

#85

Post by ryusage »

outworlder wrote: post #46
Irregardless wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

AFAIK, Guild Wars 2 has essentially zero downtime for updates. There was a talk posted online a while ago about their backend tools and architecture. It's really very impressive actually.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13u1mz/watch_thi...

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

#86

Post by cpprototypes »

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…

Yeah I agree, how can a mega billion company like EA fail so badly on marketing. Strategy should've been simple:

1) release it as sim city online, with marketing emphasizing it's like a sim city mmo. People will be more tolerant of launch network issues. Make lots of $$$

2) later release single player sim city 5 (just rip out online parts from above) make more $$$

Such an inept company.

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

#87

Post by jgj »

mnicole wrote: post #72
adimitrov wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I fear the game might just in general not be good enough for this to happen. My thoughts exactly; Giant Bomb's hour-long video review was pretty telling of the issues in the game that a lot of people just haven't been able to deal with yet. Problems that are only around because so much time was spent trying to implement the multiplayer aspect rather than focusing on the core gameplay itself. I want a new SimCity ga…

I found this in one of the other sim city threads du jour: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1584821767/civitas-plan-...

they are getting much of my monies

EDIT: Don't remember which thread i found it in, so here are the posts that may have been the one that I found the kickstarter link in:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5343788 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5341070

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

#89

Post by ChuckMcM »

npsimons wrote: post #76
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…

This is the future of gaming. Then I guess I won't be gaming anymore. Not that I do much now, and I've mostly quit for other unrelated reasons, but if is the future of gaming, you can count me, and I'm sure many others, out. I used to game a lot. I used to spend a not insignificant amount of money on games. If the publishers want to basically steal my money and call me the thief, then they can forget about having me…

Actually it is the future, and like you I too don't buy games much any more. Your kids or your peer's kids though will play games this way because it is the only way to get them and they will think its 'normal.' Eventually you'll be called an 'old timer' and derided for all your comments about how in your day when you bought a game it didn't need to download 4GB of 'patches' nor did it require Internet access to run.

What is most curious though, is whether or not this new world order is stable long term. Other creative works publishers like movie studios or musicians, can capture the long tail of revenue for their products long after the initial 'rush' but for game studios and other 'active' products there is this continual draw on the host companies resources to keep servers alive or what not. So eventually keeping a game 'alive' starts generating negative money. And killing a game generates negative customer sentiment. So the combination might overwhelm the business model.

Only time will tell.

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

#90

Post by crisnoble »

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…

If you want to play 2000, GOG.com has it for 6 bucks. Works perfectly on my mac, and I love playing it while offline on my long train ride. It's a shame, since when I am offline is the only time I play games, that I won't get to play the new one...
Post reply on HN