Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#151

Post by scarlson » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 9:56 PM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #48

cryptoz wrote: post #18

This could be a very big moment. EA is selling a completely broken product - and I mean that from the perspective of the average consumer, not the nerd who thinks all DRM is broken - and they're doing it for absolutely no reason . If this lasts long enough and gets enough press, it could actually be a turning point against DRM like this. That would be so wonderful.

The thinking goes - without DRM, some large number, X % of the games are just copied instead of purchased. With DRM, close to 0% of the the games are copied, but some large number Y % of the games are no longer purchased because people either are (A) Philisophically opposed to DRM, (B) Want to be able to play the game offline, or now, (C) Can't play the game because the DRM breaks it. The balancing act, here, is how…

Your C point implies purchase.

It's safe to assume EA uses purchases as their success metric, as they are unlikely to complain you actually paid for the game.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#152

Post by Semaphor » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 9:56 PM UTC

criley wrote: post #3

samstave wrote: post #2

I'm not going to lie: I will buy this game as soon as someone cracks the DRM and allows single, offline play.

You mean, when someone reverse engineers their massively multiplayer server scheme and rewrites an entire server wrapper for a game that follows the client/server paradigm? This isn't a case where a client-only software package is locked by a remote server. This is a case where core game logic is stored on servers and will have to be reverse engineered or emulated on some level to play truly offline.

Not sure how it changed after the release, but I remember there being alpha or pre-alpha WoW servers.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#153

Post by ghshephard » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 9:57 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #95

ghshephard wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I totally appreciate that - and, those people who would never have purchased the game in the first place, but copy it, provide some good word of mouth advertising for the game. The thing is though, if the number gets high enough, let's say 95% of people just copy the game (not unlikely in the age of torrents) and only 5% purchase it - might not be enough to fund a AAA game, whose budgets now run in the 100s of mi…

I agree. I do think the effect of piracy on a company's bottom line is overstated in just about every case. It's easy for us an the HN community (generally pretty intelligent and technically inclined) to forget that downloading a torrent isn't the simplest thing in the world, particularly the lengths you need to go to in order to get some pirated games to even function properly.

Torrents have gotten pretty amazingly simple and are now mainstream . My 65 year old mother figured out how to torrent a TV show (that wasn't available in Canada - she tried to buy it first, but they wouldn't sell it to her) in about 30 minutes, including the time required to download and install µTorrent. I would guess that 90%+ of the computer using population is now comfortable torrenting files.

Agreed with you on the hassle of running a pirated game, and, honestly - I'm unwilling to run some random .app/.exe on my system. Hell, I'm not even comfortable opening .pdfs anymore.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#154

Post by NoPiece » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 9:58 PM UTC

OWaz wrote: post #129

goatforce5 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt. Doesn't mean you have to implement it badly though.

What I'm failing to understand is how a company the size of EA could launch a game with strict online requirements and fail to deliver online capabilities.

I think the bigger the company the more likely it is to happen. You may have separate teams in separate locations with differing agendas. One building the game, another managing infrastructure, not necessarily on the same page or with the same goals. Software team will say they want the best user experience. The IT team might be hearing they need to get costs under control, so they are going to try and be efficient and not over capacity. The software guys may have had a passion for single player, but marketing needs them to add features they are not passionate about. They spend less time on and the features end up less robust.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#155

Post by tobyjsullivan » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 9:58 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #77

ineedtosleep wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EA have already launched a product like this: Battlefield 3. It was pretty unstable in the first weeks and the game required an internet connection and login to even play the game. Since it's a PC FPS that's not CoD, it didn't get too much press. I, for one, will not trust another game a DRM-laden game again due to BF3 and SimCity 2013 just reinforces that.

I've seen pirated copies of (single-player only) BF3. What about the DRM is so different between that and Sim City?

I believe BF3 used internet connectivity only for DRM which means it's easy to carve out. SimCity actually computes the game mechanics on their cloud servers.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#156

Post by scarlson » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 9:59 PM UTC

dragondilesh wrote: post #113

anon1385 wrote: post #96

When a game requires an internet connection to work we call it DRM and slam it. When a text editor or spreadsheet requires an internet connection to run we call it innovation.

The situation isn't as simple as you put it. This time, there is single player game that shouldn't need forced interactivity with an internet connection. Compared to a text editor where the internet connection allowed multiple users to operate on it at the same time.

That and I'm not spending 60$ for Google Docs access.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#157

Post by fennecfoxen » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 9:59 PM UTC

arkitaip wrote: post #16

fennecfoxen wrote: post #13

So did they not even bother to look at the debacle of a launch that was _Cities XL_? Or did they imagine themselves immune?

EA has a very long history of anti consumer practices. Pretty much everyone expected some kind of fubar on launch but even this level of incompetence surprised most jaded gamers.

Yeah, it's not even the screw-the-consumer DRM part: I expected that a competent product manager would have said "Hey, our competitors built a city-sim game that was supposed to incorporate a significant online gameplay element, and it didn't go so well for them. What can we learn from this and how can we avoid it?"

So either they didn't ask the question, or they didn't answer it well, or they didn't bother avoiding the problems after they learned it, or they managed to flub it anyway. I'd be curious to know which dysfunction they suffered from.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#158

Post by Andaith » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 10:01 PM UTC

littlegiantcap wrote: post #36

It's been fun while I've actually been able to connect to EA's servers. (which is rare). I'm not going to beat the anti-drm drum, but I will say this. If EA is going to go this route they had better have the resources available to make it happen. I for one actually don't mind it, if it was able to work.

This is all an assumption but:

With the amount of stuff that gets simulated on their servers, the sim city servers are probably more resource intensive than even really popular FPS servers.

That means they're also more expensive per person than most other game servers.

What happens when it's no longer profitable for EA to keep them running? I doubt they'll release the source code.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#159

Post by 27182818284 » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 10:01 PM UTC

NoPiece wrote: post #53

goatforce5 wrote: post #49

Where's Steve Jobs when you need him? > Steve Jobs summoned the MobileMe team to the Town Hall > auditorium on Apple’s Cupertino campus for an obscenity- > laden dressing down. ‘You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,’ > he told them. ‘You should hate each other for having let > each other down.’ Then he named a new executive on the spot > to run the team.” http://macdailynews.com/2011/05/08/steve-jobs-to-those-respo...

Although it is more likely in this case that the EA executives mandated online only to the developers.

Why? I see this over and over again in this thread, but I don't believe it anymore because it is not just a one-off case of the developers being ignored, they're willingly doing bad practices like this over and over and over again.

Best case: They do it reluctantly, but don't care enough about their work to stop it. Worst case: They do it willingly and think it is a great idea.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#160

Post by aeturnum » Thu, Mar 07, 2013, 10:02 PM UTC

reitzensteinm wrote: post #106

spartango wrote: post #81

Can we talk about this more clearly? This isn't strictly "evil DRM" as people are highlighting. Unlike some other games, it's not like SimCity is just phoning home to figure out if it is licensed or not, and preventing unlicensed copies. SimCity depends on EA/Maxis' server infrastructure for a great deal of storage and computation related to the macro-scale components of each game. Not only is city state synced there…

I don't think you're adding clarity here. People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copies. There is no technical reason for its absence. The cloud based stuff sounds great, and if it were an optional extra that was unavailable at launch due to technical difficulties, I doubt you'd see a hundredth as much bad PR.

>People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copies. There is no technical reason for its absence.

I see this sentiment expressed pretty often, but in this case it seems flawed. From what I understand, you can't build a city that does everything, instead you rely on the other cities in your 'region.'

The new Simcity is no more single player than World of Warcraft. The previous games were single player, as they focused on a monolithic city. This game is designed from the ground up with the assumption that you will play with other people. There's no technical restrictions preventing Blizzard from offering single-person servers for WoW, it just doesn't follow from the game design. The same is true here.