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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

#411

Post by egeozcan »

overgard wrote: post #380
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…

Honest question: have you played the new game? I got a few hours in before I ran into the issues everyone outlined, but after having built a pretty sizable city, my impression is that the multiplayer/online aspects of the game are pretty much worthless. It feels more like a feature box being checked than a core element of the game. I get the impression that they tried, but it ultimately feels incongruent with the cor…

> This isn't a proper Sim City game.

To me it felt like I'm playing DRM with features inspired from simcity. Sadly, I'm not joking.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#412

Post by fdr_cs »

Tloewald wrote: post #256
Fargren wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also known as the Diablo III strategy.

Diablo III was (I think -- not like I've played Sim City yet) worse because the online AH was built into the gameplay Imagine if WoW's loot had been designed so that raid loot would NEED to be traded via a real money AH with Blizzard taking a cut. Of course for all we know Sim City will turn out to have that kind if BS too.

In Sim City case, part of the simulation is run at their servers. Even while playing a private region, lost of aspects of the simulation are affected by the 'world' (other players). So, it´s not _just_ a matter of DRM: online is part of the game (unfortunately). The point is: did the developers decided to do it that way _because_ EA made online DRM mandatory for them, or they did think this way since t=0 ? We´ll probably never know.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#413

Post by andypants »

ghshephard wrote: post #153
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.

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…

Torrenting video games is still a bit more involved than torrenting a tv show.

You have zips, rars, 7zs, archives split into parts. Some need you to mount a iso file, some you need to mount multiple iso files. You may need to run a sketchy exe to patch the game, or copy files from an iso into the installation folder, run other patches in the correct order, etc. etc.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#414

Post by skore »

Tloewald wrote: post #255
archangel_one wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of defeats the purpose of doing an AMA if you're not allowed to answer any of the interesting questions. I sympathise if that was the case, but people should remember what the second 'A' stands for.

It's Ask Me Anything, not I'll tell you everything.

Ask Me Anything About Rampart.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#415

Post by s_kilk »

rurounijones wrote: post #290
chongli wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea here is to force you to be reliant on the network; to move the processing onto their servers. SimCity isn't a normal game, it's a SaaS game.

SaaS Game, very well put! Do we need a new acronym for games that required black-box server side components (Not just DRM but entire chunks of game code) not controlled by the consumer? GaaS? (Game as a Service)? Ubisoft did the same thing with the last silent Hunter game IIRC.

>> SaaS Game ... (Game as a Service)

This is hardly a new concept, Eve Online is a fairly prominent example of a game that is run entirely as a subscription service. I'm sure there are other MMO games that do the same, however there are others like World of Warcraft which combine a subscription service with a "boxed" game client.

In the context of the current discussion, I think EA could have made the new SimCity game entirely service based, like Eve, giving the client software as a free download and charging for access to the server, where most/all of the actual simulation logic would live. Instead they've pulled a bait-and-switch with a boxed product.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#416

Post by rurounijones »

s_kilk wrote: post #415
rurounijones wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SaaS Game, very well put! Do we need a new acronym for games that required black-box server side components (Not just DRM but entire chunks of game code) not controlled by the consumer? GaaS? (Game as a Service)? Ubisoft did the same thing with the last silent Hunter game IIRC.

>> SaaS Game ... (Game as a Service) This is hardly a new concept, Eve Online is a fairly prominent example of a game that is run entirely as a subscription service. I'm sure there are other MMO games that do the same, however there are others like World of Warcraft which combine a subscription service with a "boxed" game client. In the context of the current discussion, I think EA could have made the new SimCity gam…

I was excluding MMOs from the above since the expectations of those are that they are multi-player and subscription based.

When I was talking about GaaS I was sarcastically talking about ostensibly single-player games are crippled in this way.

Crippleware is a good one too :)

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#417

Post by simonh »

hatcravat wrote: post #399
pwthornton wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple didn't voluntarily stop using DRM; they convinced the labels to stop requiring it. Piracy isn't Apple's concern, but the user experience is. This is in service of saying that DRM isn't in the user's best interest and even big companies that care about user experience don't like DRM. Apple didn't ship DRM on its OSes when they were DVD based either. Yes they probably lost some sales due to piracy, but not having…

>they convinced the labels to stop requiring it. Are you sure it wasn't the other way around? People were building huge libraries of music that only worked on Apple products (iPods and iTunes) around the time the labels allowed Amazon to start selling DRM-free MP3s. Apple would have gained an enormous amount of leverage if the labels had allowed that to continue: "Oh, you won't accept our terms? Well, then your produ…

>>they convinced the labels to stop requiring it. > >Are you sure it wasn't the other way around?

You must have missed this. A Steve Jobs classic. Music industry execs have confirmed Apple was behind the move away from DRM.

http://www.apple.com/uk/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#418

Post by jiggy2011 »

estel wrote: post #409
jiggy2011 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I absolutely agree that that's a loss, but that argument would seem to apply equally to all online games. But a game isn't less worth playing because it's online, right?

It potentially applies to any game without wide distribution of all required software. An online game where the server software was available to the public could potentially last forever, for example it is still possible to play early betas of counterstrike.

One solution may be to propose an escrow system.

A neutral non profit (or several) sets up an entity which exists to collect software binaries and/or source code from companies under strict NDA.

At some event, either after a period of time or at the time in which the service based on that software ceases to operate; the software is released to the public (either for free or for some payment to the escrow entity).

In return the company gets a "no abandonware" sticker it can use in it's marketing/branding which gives consumers confidence in their purchase.

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#419

Post by caligo »

bluedanieru wrote: post #349
caligo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played Diablo 3 quite soon after launch and while there were "hiccups" (my character would occasionally jump around due to lag) I could connect fairly quickly to a server. From the reviews the Sim City servers seem to be overloaded much more than D3 servers were. The always connected to the internet aspect was bad for D3 and it seems it is even worse for Sim City. If I remember correctly, Blizzard had legal problem…

I agree with you in principle but I will suggest that titles which are overly-burdened with bullshit DRM will tend to be less important to the cultural record. I think that's the case here.

I don't disagree with you :)

Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

#420

Post by roc »

vor_ wrote: post #370
roc wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Takeover by EA is usually considered a death knell for game studios..." Further to this point: Maxis, makers of Sim City, were notable for a long time as being the glaring exception when it came to EA's habit of buying and squeezing studios to death. But the writing was on the wall when THE SIMS hit so big and was.. "exploited"[1] so heavily. And when Will left... well, it's just flat-out inconceivable that anyone…

That cartoon is about Bobby Kotick of Activision.

Yes and EA is openly following the same playbook and has been less-openly following it for years. One could argue Activision took it from EA.
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