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Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#381

Post by _b8r0 »

After the Tetris debacle[1] on iOS and putting obtrusive adverts into their iOS games for new ones despite me paying for them (a cardinal sin IMHO) combined with endless DRM debacles and horror stories about how employees were treated, I took the decision to never buy or install another EA game again.

Electronic Arts (which EA is the mutated-gollum-like growth of) was actually a software developer that was based on the idea of the developers being artists. They shared lavish profits with them, put the developers' faces on boxes and made some amazing games. If you want to see some highlights of Electronic Arts' back catalogue, take a look at these:

* M.U.L.E - http://www.worldofmule.net/tiki-index.php

* Desert Strike - http://www.mobygames.com/game/desert-strike-return-to-the-gu...

* Populous - http://www.mobygames.com/game/populous

* The Bard's Tale - http://bardstale.poverellomedia.com/

* F/A-18 Interceptor - http://www.mobygames.com/game/fa-18-interceptor

* Indy 500 - http://www.mobygames.com/game/indianapolis-500-the-simulatio...

* Road Rash - http://www.mobygames.com/game/road-rash

A lot (but not all) of these were games developed when Trip Hawkins was in charge. Trip Hawkins went on to found the failed 3DO console, which is where a lot of the modern 3D versions of the popular franchises (NFS, FIFA etc.) first started out.

If you don't like DRM, being nickel and dimed, or scummy company practices. I highly recommend you boycott EA and spend your money on the plenty of City building alternatives on Steam[2] instead.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_(mobile_video_game)#App_...

[2] - http://store.steampowered.com/

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#382

Post by guelo »

jlgreco wrote: post #327
Steko wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how the anti-government mindset even blames greed based failures of private industry on the government.

I love how the pro-government mindset sees even casual jokes at the expense of governments as "blaming the government".

Anti-government joke: something stupid or bad happened. That's just like the government! Har har har har

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#383

Post by belorn »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #216
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #42

I feel bad for the game devs who got to see their hard work turn into something they don't intend. I suppose this is a great advertising technique for small firms, startups, indie shops, etc. "Don't want this[ http://amazon-pulls-sim-city ] to happen? Work for our small team. We won't destroy your work." I know it's standard to say "you get a part in the decisionmaking process!" That's part of it. But a lot of people…

Is the auth space something a startup could occupy? "Easy DRM/Auth for games that doesn't suck?"

Effective DRM is less about technology, and more about incentives. It would not even be hard to implement if the sole goal is to maximize revenue. Sadly, most DRM schemes has a secondary goal of control rather than revenue maximization.

So how would this work: 1) have a early launch code included in collector versions and pre-order, for something around 1 week. 2) include a special DRM system for only the pre-launch week, and announce that it will be removed after the pre-launch week.

the benefits: 1) Crackers are people, and there is little incentives for 1 week crack. A honor system could also encourage them to avoid cracking the game, if this model is made in honest. 2) Buyers are people, and those that would buy the game at launch (90-95% of revenue) will not have a pirate game to pick from. 3) pirates are people, and those that rather wait for a crack will wait here too.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#384

Post by belorn »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #368
DigitalSea wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the case for non EA games, but considering people won't get to play Simcity within the next 2 weeks or so, there'll be a cracked version out by then. EA have brought themselves nothing but trouble in this situation and being the out-of-touch company they are, they deserve every loss of sale they get.

This isn't like normal DRM, key parts of the game logic and performed server side so you would need to reimplement the server in order to crack it. Think of it like trying to get a "crack" for 37s Basecamp or similar.

While this might sound as a big problem for crackers, I slightly doubt it. I suspect many crackers has related day-jobs, like reverse engineers. If their day jobs require them to reverse engineer the command structure of a bot net, or make deep package inspection rules for protocols, then reverse engineer a game server is not that complicated thing to do. They are going to have special made tools for this.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#385

Post by dagw »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #375
MichaelGG wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You're suggesting they use a software renderer instead of the GPU? Even if 70% of the CPU was wasted on a modern machine, that's like a quarter core per user that they'd need to rent from Amazon. I don't think so. As far as the multiplayer, I don't think anyone has a problem needing servers for multiplayer. All I'm saying is that the suggestion that computations need to be done online to save local CPU, even…

I doubt they are using EC2, probably buying servers in bulk from IBM or whoever. When you centralise you also have other advantages, such as being able to cache the results of previous computations. So if you can structure the computations in such a way as to be fully or partially reusable you can memoize and scale much better.

If you google for people attempting to reverse engineer the protocol you'll see that they've found that EA is indeed using EC2. It is however unclear if this is a permanent state of affairs or if they're simply using EC2 in an attempt to handle the initial burst of traffic

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#386

Post by jiggy2011 »

belorn wrote: post #384
jiggy2011 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't like normal DRM, key parts of the game logic and performed server side so you would need to reimplement the server in order to crack it. Think of it like trying to get a "crack" for 37s Basecamp or similar.

While this might sound as a big problem for crackers, I slightly doubt it. I suspect many crackers has related day-jobs, like reverse engineers. If their day jobs require them to reverse engineer the command structure of a bot net, or make deep package inspection rules for protocols, then reverse engineer a game server is not that complicated thing to do. They are going to have special made tools for this.

Reverse engineering the binaries and network protocols is not going to be so difficult. What would be more time consuming is reverse engineering the mathematical models used for simulation on the backend, you're going to need to observe the input->output map over a lot of possible inputs and to do that you probably need a lot of game clients connected which cost a lot of money. Not to mention not having your fuzzer detected and being banned/sued.

You might be able to eventually do a good enough job that makes your server feel quite close to the official server but then every time the game updates you either have to stick with the old way or do all of your analysis again. So you end up with a divergence between the real game and the pirate game.

It is certainly much more time consuming than figuring out how to set the "isGameValid" in securom to 1 and breaking every securom game out there. In this case you have to individually reverse engineer every single game out there, so at some point you hit the limit of the rescources that game crackers will spend on cracking. Essentially the problem with traditional DRM is that attack is easier than defence, this inverts that relationship.

Some games, WOW for example have people spending significant resources on reverse engineering them (although for different reasons) because there is a financial incentive to do it (you can make money selling rare items). There probably isn't much money in cracking simcity.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#387

Post by belorn »

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…

See conversion rates from free vs paid. Lets use the average number of 3%. 100% is all users, which mean all who bought the game added with all who would have pirated the game, and 3% is the total amount of people who would potential spend money.

Out of those 3%, you need to remove A), people who do not pirate), people who do not compare stores and just buy from what is most convenient, and C), people who would buy if there was DRM preventing piracy.

We can now assign weight to those groups. Group B, is likely to be largest given human nature and sale numbers from places like steam. Group A would likely come second, and Group C would be smallest. Lets use the weights 3/6, 2/6, 1/6 proportions for each group. That makes Group C somewhere around 0.5% of the users which the DRM scheme might get to buy the game.

Is 0.5% additional conversion rate worth the costs of DRM scheme, additional support, and a tanked amazon review rating of 1 star?

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#389

Post by Fuzzwah »

dylangs1030 wrote: post #308
pc86 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's incredibly simple to download a torrent. My non-technical parents have done it in the past, without asking me how to. In fact, from your desktop, it takes less than seven steps total to download and watch a Full HD movie of your choosing from the pirate bay.

Downloading and watching a TV show means installing and using 2 applications (utorrent and vlc for example). Downloading and playing a game from a torrent means installing and using 4-5 applications (utorrent, winrar, daemon tools, the crack, the game its self).

This is why steam and GoG wins. Before I look for my old CDs or search on p-bay for that old game which I wouldn't mind killing a few hours on, I check to see if it is ~$5 on steam or GoG. The process is so simple and next time I feel like a trip down memory lane I know it'll still be there in my steam/GoG library waiting for me.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#390

Post by jiggy2011 »

estel wrote: post #348
johnward wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is at some point they could pull the plug. I still play older version of SimCity to this day.

Sure they could. But if I get £40 of value from my game before they do, I can live with that. It's not ideal, but it doesn't make it a poor purchase.

I think there is a broader cultural loss though.

In the future years when "study of video game history" becomes a thing, people will be able to examine and analyse old games like SimCity 2000 by actually playing them as they were. Since they have been archived and preserved by wide distribution.

Then as you get further into the future maybe you start to come across games where you have to say "sadly the only existing copy of the server code was lost in the great github fire of 2020, so all we can show you is this archived footage".

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