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SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

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Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#11

Post by fuuuuuuuuuuu »

simonsarris wrote: post #5

This was dreadful and embarrassing to read through. Zero new information, no apologies, just dodging. > You can pop from work to home, play the game and have your cities available to you anywhere. "Anywhere" there's an internet connection, "anytime" their servers are up. You want to claim its an MMO? You want to claim game-as-a-service? Fine. But sell it as that, charge me $15 a month for an ephemeral product. Not $6…

If they charged you $15 per month, they'd have to refund you for the fact it's been down a significant portion of the month; I mean, can you imagine the shitshow if WoW were down for a week and Blizzard just kept charging people (and gave no credit)?

This way they can pretend they aren't just taking your money and completely failing to deliver a viable product on the timing promised.

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#12

Post by xymostech »

simonsarris wrote: post #5

This was dreadful and embarrassing to read through. Zero new information, no apologies, just dodging. > You can pop from work to home, play the game and have your cities available to you anywhere. "Anywhere" there's an internet connection, "anytime" their servers are up. You want to claim its an MMO? You want to claim game-as-a-service? Fine. But sell it as that, charge me $15 a month for an ephemeral product. Not $6…

Guild Wars 2 sells an actual MMO as a one-time fee, and they're doing just swell. I've heard most people claim that as one of its benefits, not a downside. Not sure what that means, just wanted to point out that people often do enjoy single-fee game-as-a-services.

Also, when you say "$60 for something I can't even use on my own time" are you claiming that the game doesn't even work, as all of the hyped up gaming articles are claiming? I've been watching someone stream the game for the past week and a half, and he's been doing just fine, playing consistently for about 8 hours a day, each day since the release. So, sure, there are some problems with it, but it's not like the game is so horribly broken that you can't use it.

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#13

Post by minimaxir »

xymostech wrote: post #12
simonsarris wrote: post #5

This was dreadful and embarrassing to read through. Zero new information, no apologies, just dodging. > You can pop from work to home, play the game and have your cities available to you anywhere. "Anywhere" there's an internet connection, "anytime" their servers are up. You want to claim its an MMO? You want to claim game-as-a-service? Fine. But sell it as that, charge me $15 a month for an ephemeral product. Not $6…

Guild Wars 2 sells an actual MMO as a one-time fee, and they're doing just swell. I've heard most people claim that as one of its benefits, not a downside. Not sure what that means, just wanted to point out that people often do enjoy single-fee game-as-a-services. Also, when you say "$60 for something I can't even use on my own time" are you claiming that the game doesn't even work, as all of the hyped up gaming arti…

Guild Wars 2 fan here.

It's worth noting that GW2 has a substantial amount of non-trivial in-game purchases to subsidize the persistent costs of maintaining the servers in lieu of an online fee, and some game design is specifically tailored to provide incentives for players to make these purchases.

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#15

Post by NoPiece »

EA should clean house on their PR team. What disastrous responses. To starting this post with, "I hate to disturb you when you’re playing SimCity," is so gross, self congratulatory, and not contrite. That plus doubling down on the dishonesty instead of really offering straight answers is just going to fuel the fires.

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#16

Post by ijk »

xymostech wrote: post #12
simonsarris wrote: post #5

This was dreadful and embarrassing to read through. Zero new information, no apologies, just dodging. > You can pop from work to home, play the game and have your cities available to you anywhere. "Anywhere" there's an internet connection, "anytime" their servers are up. You want to claim its an MMO? You want to claim game-as-a-service? Fine. But sell it as that, charge me $15 a month for an ephemeral product. Not $6…

Guild Wars 2 sells an actual MMO as a one-time fee, and they're doing just swell. I've heard most people claim that as one of its benefits, not a downside. Not sure what that means, just wanted to point out that people often do enjoy single-fee game-as-a-services. Also, when you say "$60 for something I can't even use on my own time" are you claiming that the game doesn't even work, as all of the hyped up gaming arti…

"It works for this one guy I know" is not really data.

I think the real problem, though, is that EA has been treating this as a boxed product launch, not a service, and then acting shocked when they have service-type problems. If they had really treated it as a service, internally, they would have done things that might have prevented this, like doing a soft-launch, actual beta stress testing, having transparently scalable servers, etc.

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#17

Post by anonymousab »

minimaxir wrote: post #7

So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision. Hindsight is 20/20 indeed.

Heck, they could still do it easily. The game periodically does make encrypted/obfuscated local 'saves' which are automatically deleted over time.

If a release group (against all odds) beats them to it then all the better.

Re: SimCity Update: Straight Answers from Lucy

#20

Post by xymostech »

minimaxir wrote: post #13
xymostech wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guild Wars 2 sells an actual MMO as a one-time fee, and they're doing just swell. I've heard most people claim that as one of its benefits, not a downside. Not sure what that means, just wanted to point out that people often do enjoy single-fee game-as-a-services. Also, when you say "$60 for something I can't even use on my own time" are you claiming that the game doesn't even work, as all of the hyped up gaming arti…

Guild Wars 2 fan here. It's worth noting that GW2 has a substantial amount of non-trivial in-game purchases to subsidize the persistent costs of maintaining the servers in lieu of an online fee, and some game design is specifically tailored to provide incentives for players to make these purchases.

That is a good point. I've avoided it, so I forgot that it can be a large part of the game.

However, one could argue that Maxis will likely be releasing DLC/Expansion packs for Sim City (seeing as they've done this for every other Sim game they've made) so those can be a substitute for the online fee as well. I guess time will tell.

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