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

The ugly truth remains the same: this game is "social" just as an excuse to implement hardcore DRM. Sugar-coating.

You can do things like: - volunteer excess services such as fire trucks, police cars, trash pickup, recycling trucks. The last one there can be lucrative if you use the raw materials you collect to build processors. - buy water/power/etc utility capacity on an as-needed basis. Instead of having a brownout if your city grows but you forgot to scale up your electricity production, it'll just buy some automatically from other cities in the region - town hall upgrade modules, such as the "department of transportation" which allows more transit options (train/ferry), "department of education" that allows colleges and universities, etc are shared with the region. Each time you level up your city hall you are allowed to add one of the department modules. Eventually you get to a point where you need over 290k citizens, but want some of the upgrades from a department you haven't built yet. A neighboring city can build those departments to help you out. - After spending a bunch of money on university research and applying for a great works project, cities can contribute the resources needed to build these large scale products, and all the cities in the region benefit. Great works projects are things like a major airport, a huge solar collector (the size of a city), a space program, etc. Some bring tourists, some provide resources, etc.

The game is extremely social, but if you'd like you can ignore it. I'm in agreement with everyone here that if you want to ignore the social and play offline, you should be able to.

People bought the game knowing the DRM would be heavy. That's not what's killing SimCity. The real reason this failed is because it broke. It crashed and burned terrifically. It was implemented poorly, and it was really unreliable.

The warning here is this: make shit that works. We would see the same outcry if an offline game crashed regularly, deleted saves, and had bugs on opening day that made it unplayable.

But this is Always-Online DRM done wrong. You DO NOT prioritize prevention of pirate-enabled playing of your game. You DO NOT implement anything which causes legitimate users to not be able to play. You DO prioritize UX over anything else at launch. You bias heavily to avoid false positives. Legit users (i.e. customers) are your first priority -- as they should be.

Most of all, you do not live in the fantasy world of DRM being some kind of impenetrable fortress. Basically, the resources of the entire Internet are arrayed against you, and the forces on your side constitute several hundred people in your company at most. You as the game publisher aren't the evil empire. You're the guerrillas. You don't have a vast army and an impenetrable fortress. You have a few fighters on your side and a jungle to hide in.

Here is what you do: You prioritize detection. You let the pirates play. You let the pirates believe that they've broken your DRM by throwing some honeypot DRM at them for them to break. All the while, you're detecting them. Then, when they think they've won, you use assets that you can control (servers) to restrict the pirate-enabled users you've detected. The point here is to be the one to keep the pirates guessing, not the other way around. Let them announce cracks, then make sure they get egg on their face a week after their "release -- again and again. Basically, you fight dirty to make sure that your product is far superior to the pirate's.

The way to have DLC in the modern age is to make sure that a key element of your "DLC" always stays on the server.