431–440 of 452 posts
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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
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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.
Isn't: > We can argue about whether these things should be computed and stored in the cloud, but I think there is a plausible, if imperfect, argument for doing so Conceivably true? We could be in a world with no DRM, but there would still be a market trend moving games towards a more social, connected and integrated experience; and some developers will be looking at ways to fundamentally build their new games in a wa…
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Thankfully so... I once ran an Ohio-class SSBN aground in a channel in a loss-of-all-possible-NAVAIDS casualty. Luckily it was in a simulator (unluckily, our bosses were there to see it happen).
Your sextant wasn't working?
Either way though, hard to shoot an accurate azimuth when heavy fog miraculously rolls in out of nowhere and limits visibility to ~100 ft from the bridge. :)
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I was speaking more broadly. This isn't the first time EA has seriously blown a launch due to infrastructure issues I realize. EA's main infrastructure server team runs things like a pre-dotbomb forture 5. I'm slow to throw blame since EA's acquisitions chose to join EA. Technical Directors at Maxis are just as much to blame as well as product/project managers that fail to squeeze load testing into the busy schedule.…
>since EA's acquisitions chose to join EA. Not quite correct. Maxis' shareholders decided to join EA; I doubt the average programmer, or even the average project manager or tech lead had any say in the process whatsoever.
Amazon is still selling the physical version. Why would they pull the digital download and not the physical copy? Is it because there are different people responsible for it?
I thought it might be an automatic block based on 1-star reviews, but both products have the same 88% 1-star reviews right now. Digital: 765/866 = 88.3% DVD: 912/1038 = 87.9%
I'm just curious of a way to eliminate all the people who made up their mind before the game even came out.
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…
A small team might not. However, they also won't have the resources typical a larger triple-A product either. Nor will your game have a marketing team behind it to draw gamer attention with.
Without that, your game has to have a combination of cleverness and buzz. The latter requires a certain degree of luck.
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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.
They sold server-side processing as a "feature" for what should otherwise be a single-player game. Did anyone not see this coming when it was last discussed on HN? I remember thinking that the servers were guaranteed to melt on launch day.
Reading the comments below it sounds like there is an infrastructure scaling issue going on down at EA (I'm no DRM specialist). If that is indeed the case: Methinks the AWS sales guy/gal on the EA account has just been handed the easiest ROI they could ask for. "Buy my cloud, and we will be able to start selling your game again."
Although that won't tend to work if EA is already using AWS a lot.
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Are you forgetting Spore? It was Will's baby, and it sucked.
I thought it did well commercially, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(2008_video_game)
Unfortunately, the citation link is dead on the article. I don't know if this answers your question about commercial success. Maybe someone knows more about this data point in context of the industry.
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EA is also actively working on making things less bad by provisioning more hardware and disabling "non-critical" features. DRM is DRM. People only get angry when things don't work, with the occasional philosophical argument thrown in to prove a point after the fact. Steam gets less hate only because their servers have better uptime, but the hate towards EA comes in the form of a philosophical argument about how DRM i…
Ultimately I think users are pragmatic; if DRM stays out of the way they won't care, and that's by-and-large how Steam is for most people. They also seem to focus on value-add items, such as being able to install (easily!) on multiple computers, operating systems, etc., whereas EA and other companies seem to provide more pain than pleasure. If a company appears to be trying to help people, they'll lovingly hand over…