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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

#111

Post by tobyjsullivan »

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 -…

I think the real mismatch for EA and Gamers is that EA is effectively selling a SaaS product but pricing it like it's an boxed product.

It's not just unlikely but, in fact, impossible for the operating costs of the servers to be worth keeping on forever since no (significant) additional income will be coming in from the title after some point X.

SaaS companies have been dealing with this for years quite successfully via their "pay as you go" monthly subscriptions. This keeps the money flowing in and motivation to keep the servers on. And, better yet, it gives the consumer confidence that the service provider is going to pay attention to the product long-term, not just during launch day.

My recommendation for EA moving forward would be to move to subscription pricing for any games that operate as online-only - single- or multi-player.

Exact pricing is important as well. My initial instinct was to say that they should prorate the cost, something like $5/month but I quickly realized why this wouldn't work. Obviously most gamers are fickle and have short attention spans. 90% of buyers probably wouldn't buy month two and it wouldn't work out.

Instead, I would recommend pricing the game at something like $60 for two years. Same price and clearer value to me as a customer. Suddenly I'm not worried if they are going to shut off the servers in four years because that's not what I'm paying for today (and really never was). I'm paying for the opportunity to play this week and, if I love it, play it over and over again for two full years. Is that worth $60? Absolutely! And what about in two years? If I'm still loving it, hopefully they let me renew for another two years, maybe even at a discount. And if the game ends up sucking and nobody renews, they can turn the servers off (or throttle them down) without feeling bad.

The real risk with the current system isn't in case the game is a flop and they turn the servers off prematurely. It's actually if the game is legendary, like SimCities of past, and the passion to play keeps momentum for decades. How can EA keep the lights on?

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

#112

Post by davidroberts »

Having been required to defend undefensible companies policies in some customer service jobs I previously held, I feel really sorry for the customer service agent here. Probably somebody hoping to use this job as a leg up to something better, but now he is stuck in angry customer hell with nothing to do but quote policies that make them angrier. And his performance is probably being judged based on some customer satisfaction survey where even one unsatisfied customer is enough to lose a month's worth of bonuses.

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

#113

Post by danielweber »

toki5 wrote: post #91
mynameisvlad wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because there's a semantic difference between "SimCity" and "SimCity Online." SimCity's been a single-player offline experience since its inception. It's reasonable to believe in a vacuum that a newly-released "SimCity" game will be the same. Lots of people are in such a vacuum -- a LOT of people hear "A new SimCity game is coming out / has come out" in their periphery and, having enjoyed its past iterations, rush to…

I'm sure they had discussions about whether they should have called it "SimCity Online." I think they made the wrong decision, but maybe they thought that people would assume "online == free-to-play."

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

#114

Post by ConceptJunkie »

lotharbot wrote: post #108
ChuckMcM wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> "So eventually keeping a game 'alive' starts generating negative money" When a game nears that point, the publishers can theoretically push a patch that removes the "must be online" components and/or allows connection to self-run servers, so the community can keep it alive. I'm aware of a few companies actually doing something like this. Years ago, Parallax/Outrage/Volition (of the Descent series) went out of their…

Perhaps, but companies like that are the exception, not the rule. I fully expect that companies like EA don't give a warm bucket of spit about anything past the initial phase during which a game will be sold.

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

#115

Post by nemothekid »

jfoutz wrote: post #12

If anyone could achieve a decent launch, it's blizzard. They have a lot of money and talent, and a real attention to detail. They're willing to wait to ship games "till they're ready" But launch still eludes them. I've purchased every game through Diablo 3, but that put me off the whole thing. Heart of the swarm will be the first Blizzard game i just don't bother with. The launch will be a disaster. Since they've tak…

When Diablo was released people complained about the same exact thing. Its amazing how these issues completely blow over once the product is stable.

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/19169-diablo-3-launch-marred-b...

Reddit's /r/gaming was filled with Diablo launch problems.

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

#116

Post by nonamegiven »

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 -…

This is like the "good old days" of TV and movies, when you could only watch the Wizard of Oz once a year at Halloween, and you couldn't watch any old movies at all unless they came on the Late Show or showed at a local art theater.

I don't know why a game publisher wouldn't want to sell new copies of old games forever, like you can do with movies in the good new days.

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

#117

Post by mnicole »

jgj wrote: post #87
mnicole wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Thank you! Will be interesting to see how many Amazon-refunded players will be taking that money and putting it into this and projects like it.

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

#118

Post by Armbrs »

uptown wrote: post #88

Ironic that this is happening on a game that's all about mitigating disasters.

It's all part of their plan. Now that everyone claims to know what EA should have done, they're primed to buy the sequel, SimServer. Where you get to layout the network infrastructure for a new online game.

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

#119

Post by Yuioup »

potatolicious wrote: post #15
mikeash wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely those tie-ins could have been written to degrade gracefully when the servers are unavailable, rather than just refusing to run the entire game.

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…

Just like everybody else who replied to your comment I do not believe for a second that any processing is done on the server side.

I think you have been fooled by EA's marketing.

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

#120

Post by TelmoMenezes »

ryusage wrote: post #19

It'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…

People are pissed because it's an artificial restriction. People understand that talking to a server is necessary for an MMO to work, and they also understand it is not necessary for SimCity to work.

When an MMO talks to a server. it's in the user's best interest. When SimCity tries to talk to a server, it's against the user's best interest, who might want to play in a place without an internet connection, but is prevented to do so by a system that does nothing for him or her to begin with. It's weird that this is not obvious.

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