SimCity Release

[Jackalope]

No, you cannot. If you lose connectivity for more than a short period, the game exits. As saved games are stored on EA's servers, you lose all progress since the last save.

A particularly onerous anti-piracy measure, if you ask me.

[Cinjin]

No, you cannot. If you lose connectivity for more than a short period, the game exits. As saved games are stored on EA's servers, you lose all progress since the last save.

A particularly onerous anti-piracy measure, if you ask me.

Sure enough CD

the worst part is, the game you just paid $60 for, the game you may love, is not your game to own. You see, when a game requires an “always on” connection, and stores data on EA’s servers, that means EA owns your game. If EA decides to shut the servers down, five years down the road? Tough luck. Hope you played all the SimCity 5 you’ll ever want to play, because it’s gone now. No going back to nostalgic old favorites, no showing your children an amazing time with a game that influenced your life, no reliving those memories.

So I say to EA, and any other publisher thinking like EA - stop with the “always on” bulls***. Yes, you’re going to lose some sales to piracy, and yes, it sucks. The solution isn’t to [redacted] over the people who actually want to play the game. The solution isn’t to treat the customer like a prisoner you’re graciously offering the opportunity to lease your game. The solution is to make a good game, and then people will tell their friends about it, and then those friends will buy the game and YOU WILL MAKE MASSIVE PILES OF MONEY AND NOT INDUCE RAGE ANEURYSMS IN YOUR CUSTOMER BASE.

That's a damn shame, because he said that the game is actually a lot of fun ... when it works.

[Jackalope]

Yep. It's a shame I won't be playing it.

For fucks sake, I've got games that are 20 or more years old that I can still play (and in some cases, still do occasionally). In some cases, the company that produced the game is long gone. Had those games had such requirements, I would not be able to do so.

There's games where requiring internet access is a value-add (e.g., multiplayer games). This is not one of them - it serves only to make the product worse than it would otherwise be.

[Autumnlicious]

I keep track of Battle.net 2.0 emulators in hope of ensuring that my 60$ to StarCraft II isn't wasted in case of Blizzard going tits up.

Valve has publicly stated, however, that if their services are going to end (ie Valve dies), they will release a patch to remove Steam DRM from purchased games.

That, at least, is volumes more than any other publisher that has embraced DRM has stated to the public.

But I have massive misgiving about Online-Only DRM.

I like Steam only because I can run it offline for some time without a hitch.

[Jackalope]

Same here. The DRM employed by Steam is fairly inoffensive, and provided that Valve keeps their word about releasing patches in the event that they cease operations, I have little problem with it.

Unfortunately, the industry in general appears to be under the impression that the solution to bad DRM is more bad DRM. As a software developer I can appreciate their desire to protect their products, but there comes a point when it becomes counterproductive.

I myself have not purchased a Blizzard product since Diablo II.

[Creed of Heresy]

Always-On DRM is the worst fucking idea ever. This is proof that a whole group of corporations can suddenly start making business-ruining mistakes all at once. Seriously, $60 just to rent a game from a company for an indeterminate amount of time? Fuck that.

[Jackalope]

Well, whattya know. EA's CEO gets the sack, presumably as part of the fallout from the SimCity release disaster.

[Napoléon]

I really hate the directions that EA are forcing the game industry into.

Between the shitty EA servers on FIFA, the paying for content which should be included anyway in Dead Space, and now storing user saves online, EA are ruining gaming.

[Tonus]

I played Sim City when it looked like this:



Good old Commodore 64.

I waited two weeks to get the current one. It's a fun game, but when I heard that it required a connection to their servers, I knew it would be Diablo III all over again. Since I started playing, I've experienced about 2 minutes worth of server issues, though I also moved to a different server when the first one I was on had an 18 minute queue. I grow tired of anti-piracy measures that hurt legit customers far more than they hurt software pirates.

[Cinjin]

I played Sim City when it looked like this:

good god, everyone's got a one-upsmanship when it comes to older pictures of Sim City.

Yeah well ... I was playing Sim City when it looked like this: