151–160 of 207 posts
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Subscription still doesn't prevent them from stopping subscription renewal and switching off support.
I may have failed to clearly communicate my point. My intention was that they could do a lot more to manage expectations of their customers which would, most likely, greatly reduce the ill will they are currently experiencing.
12 years ago I quit gaming because decent titles weren't available for Linux. I now have a great job and family, part of which I attribute to spending thousands of hours learning about life and technology instead of playing games. Give it up people, video games = fast-forwarding your life. (Actually I'm not really suggesting being that strict. I did return to play the occasional top title like Portal 2, but on a stri…
Give it up people, trolling the Internet = fast-forwarding your life.
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Important yes, but also presumably fairly simple to reverse engineer.
Gotcha. If that truly is all that's punted to the server we should start seeing cracks in a few weeks, I would think.
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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.
>barely work for WoW flat out lie. there are multiple well run servers that often outperform the legit ones. this is also true for all games with server emulation or otherwise private servers, they work well and often exactly the same as their legit counterparts. If you speak from 'experience', then I would suggest you didn't try hard enough to find a decent server. either way, don't exaggerate and lie to make a poin…
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This is not the future of gaming. Look at how badly SimCity flopped. Let me compare to DotA2 which I play a lot. It's exclusively multiplayer and thus needs an internet connection, yet it's free to play. How much have I spent on it? At this point at least $75+ dollars. THIS IS THE FUTURE OF GAMING. Valve has the right model. I know valve didn't create the F2P model but it has implemented it the best as far as I know.…
Online-only play is exactly what I am talking about as the (dystopian) future of gaming. Pushing more and more of the game into the cloud, so it becomes SaaS instead of worrying about DRM. Freemium versus pay-up-front are both flavors of that. Do we know that SimCity "flopped"? It's gotten lots of people angry at it, but that's not at all the same as not making money.
I feel so sorry for guys and girls responsible for keeping the systems up and running at EA. Days without sleep, without a doubt. And I'm sure their managers are cracking the whips and blaming all the bad things an them. It just makes me sad to think of :(
I predict that EA will cave-in to some extent and release a modified version of Sim City. Let the game be used in the manner that the vast majority of your paying customers prefer, or suffer a major loss of reputation.
Doubtful.
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Have you looked at EA's financials? They have been losing money for years.
I was curious so I went and looked: Mostly true, according to their SEC filings[1]. On page 28 of their 2012 10-K[2] we see their net earnings: 2012: $76M 2011: ($276M) 2010: ($677M) 2009: ($1088M) 2008: ($454M) So they juuuust squeaked back into profitability last year; probably mainly due to the slowly improving economy (games are luxury items and folks are only now cringing less when they spend on them). It's hard…
The jury is still out on how the economy affects video games.
It's often argued that video games perform similarly in recessions to the 'sin industries' - alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, etc. Some quick googling found plenty of articles about whether the video game industry is 'recession proof', but nothing I found unequivocal enough to cite.