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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

#181

Post by antihero »

sbov wrote: post #58
Irregardless wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Could we not reverse-engineer it and write our own servers?

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

#182

Post by antihero »

orbitur wrote: post #146
TelmoMenezes wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pre…

I'm skeptical about EA doing this because they are scary and evil (although I won't argue with that specifically). I am open to the idea that there is much more to the simulation than users are able to replicate on their own computers at home. I wish EA/Maxis would address specifically why an always on connection is required, so we don't have an abnormal amount of unfounded nerdrage opinions floating around about DRM…

If the simulation is more complex than a gaming PC can handle, wouldn't that mean that EA needed to (if at capacity) provide a better machine (that they have to maintain) for every copy sold? That doesn't seem sane.

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

#183

Post by damncabbage »

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…

  I wouldn't be too terribly shocked if people just sucked it 
  up and bought it anyway as long as the servers are stable.
Agreed. I have a couple of friends who are avoiding it, but I have colleagues that are going to get the game anyway despite whinging about EA being terrible.

(The above is anecdotal at best, but my gut feeling is that this will hurt EA in more than the very short term. See also: Blizzard with Diablo 3.)

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

#184

Post by electromagnetic »

yareally wrote: post #177
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…

I grabbed it on Steam last year after losing my hard copy some years ago. If one waits for a big Steam sale or adds Sim City 4 to their wish list, they get notified when it goes on sale and the typical price is 4.99 with all the addons as well. Lots of community mods out there for the game for anyone interested that fix some bugs like traffic issues.

Yeah I just loaded SimCity 4 onto my wifes Eee PC over the network and it runs fine (not even ridiculously low settings).

SimCity games were always able to hit the casual gamer, you never needed a hardcore gaming PC to play. Why SimCity 5 needs things processed server side is just for the sake of bullshit DRM.

The only way for EA to recover from this will be to release it DRM free (or at most with the serial key DRM of days gone), otherwise SimCity 5 won't even be remembered beyond the news articles of 2013. As an avid SimCity player I can recall every game, I'll never recall SimCity 5 as at this point I'll never get to play it.

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

#185

Post by petercooper »

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…

Sim City 4 is (still) superb. However, you will likely want to mod it to get the most out of it. There are also a lot of pointlessly finicky things in terms of maintaining a good budget.. enough so that I just enable a cheat for tons of money and forget about budgeting altogether (since the rest of the game is so deep, skipping financial worries loses you little and gains you a lot).

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

#186

Post by seanp2k2 »

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 -…

...and if games these days really are dependent upon services at the publisher working to do more than just validate DRM (which can usually be worked around with some very clever TOS-voiding hackery providing a local server and lying to the game client), there won't even be a way that they could just "tell the game to switch it off" before they decomm that service.

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

#187

Post by yareally »

electromagnetic wrote: post #184
yareally wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grabbed it on Steam last year after losing my hard copy some years ago. If one waits for a big Steam sale or adds Sim City 4 to their wish list, they get notified when it goes on sale and the typical price is 4.99 with all the addons as well. Lots of community mods out there for the game for anyone interested that fix some bugs like traffic issues.

Yeah I just loaded SimCity 4 onto my wifes Eee PC over the network and it runs fine (not even ridiculously low settings). SimCity games were always able to hit the casual gamer, you never needed a hardcore gaming PC to play. Why SimCity 5 needs things processed server side is just for the sake of bullshit DRM. The only way for EA to recover from this will be to release it DRM free (or at most with the serial key DRM…

> As an avid SimCity player I can recall every game, I'll never recall SimCity 5 as at this point I'll never get to play it.

Likewise :)

Played all the Sim City games all the way back to Sim City Classic (though I played it on SNES). Played the rest on PC and also rebought Sim City 2k on gog.com a while ago for nostalgia. Even my brothers, who I would only consider casual gamers were always able to play them without a problem.

I'll never touch Sim City 5 though unless it comes to Steam and without the always online DRM.

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

#188

Post by seanp2k2 »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #111
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…

>"Instead, I would recommend pricing the game at something like $60 for two years. "

While I personally understand all the costs involved and would perhaps be willing to do this (kinda like the WoW model where the game had an up-front cost plus recurring service fees), I think many would feel scammed by this model.

My question is: what is wrong with the model where single-player is totally offline, but multiplayer requires a matchmaking server that DOES validate the license? This model is already out there and works well enough (though it is 2013 and we could /probably/ figure out how to make open directory server software and/or employ P2P tech to lessen the financial burden AND increase reliability / stability / community relations...).

The bigger issue here is that American companies are trying to move us to a subscription model for /everything/, so we're always in debt and most will never truly own anything of significant value. Lease your housing, your car, your computing, your gaming, your textbooks, your cellphone, your couch, your money, etc.

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

#189

Post by mattmanser »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #188
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>"Instead, I would recommend pricing the game at something like $60 for two years. " While I personally understand all the costs involved and would perhaps be willing to do this (kinda like the WoW model where the game had an up-front cost plus recurring service fees), I think many would feel scammed by this model. My question is: what is wrong with the model where single-player is totally offline, but multiplayer re…

It's an economic consideration, by allowing offline play they believe they'll be leaving more money on the table than if they make it online only. They'll convert people who would have just got a cracked version into buying it.

Unfortunately for Maxis they obviously didn't hire any programmers who had a clue how to write scalable server code.

And the result is that they have managed to lose a lot of sales in the first few key weeks because of bad reviews.

But economically speaking, sound decision, just poorly executed.

On your last point, this is an unfortunate side effect of digital goods. In Europe we can hope for a growing political movement that this is deeply anti-consumer and will be legislated against, far more likely here than in America, but it will be hard for courts to decide where to draw a line. So ultimately I doubt it will ever happen.

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

#190

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

DocG wrote: post #65
kyrra wrote: post #3

Having played simcity as much as the servers have allowed since launch, there are definitely a number of online tie-ins. I'm sure they could have done it with player run servers or LAN type connectivity, but it removes the social aspect of the game. I rather line being able to look at the leader board, then load the cities listed there to see what they look like. Playing with a few friends in a region is a pretty coo…

All your city is managed in your local PC. Everything runs fine, only saving is cloud. Proof is that people have played though server crashes without noticing, up to 40 minutes. But, region management is server side. So basically, if one manages to skip log in and makes save-s local then one can play single city offline. This is as much information as I have at the moment.

I bet this will be cracked and people will be running private or client-side server emulators inside two weeks.
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