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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 thin

• TillE 14y ago
  Oh, there's a reason. Like Diablo III, the point is that it's effectively impossible to crack. With enough processing offloaded to the server, would-be pirates need to write something that's almost a whole new game. This is the future that big videogame companies are rushing to embrace, one where customers do not and cannot own games, merely rent them for an uncertain period. Indies and smaller studios with Kickstarter funding are going to continue eating a bigger part of their lunch.
  • bearmf 14y ago
    The irony is that it is not only impossible to crack, it is now impossible to play as well. Unplayable games are impossible to crack, but this does not make them any less absurd. DRM has come to its logical and absurd conclusion, it seems.
    • deleted 14y ago
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    • fusiongyro 14y ago
      It worked out the same way with music. For a short time the labels were experimenting with selling CDs that weren't actually audio CDs, but had been damaged in various ways to make them unplayable on a computer. The result of that experiment speaks for itself. Hopefully it will play out the same way here.
      • mmatants 14y ago
        The result is that we are increasingly switching to renting our music via services like Rdio and Spotify. And I can't say that this trend is all bad. I know what I pay for (temporary access), and I'm OK with that.
        • fusiongyro 14y ago
          Apple seems to still be doing alright selling digital music, and they voluntarily stopped using DRM.
          • pwthornton 14y ago
            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 to deal with serial numbers is big for users.
            • ariwilson 14y ago
              No, Amazon stopped using DRM to have a competitive advantage versus Apple, the music companies went along because it gave them a real competitor to iTunes, and eventually Apple managed to renegotiate their contracts so they could also remove the DRM.
              • arrrg 14y ago
                Juicy, juicy revisionist history!
                • deleted 14y ago
                  [deleted]
            • 14y ago
  • cryptoz 14y ago
    I meant no 'gameplay' reason - I know that they have a financial reason to do this, or that they think they do, at least. If they lose enough sales and get enough hate, that removes even the financial reason that they thought they had for doing this. So perhaps, hopefully, maybe, they'll choose to stop doing it.
  • networked 14y ago
    >Like Diablo III, the point is that it's effectively impossible to crack. With enough processing offloaded to the server, would-be pirates need to write something that's almost a whole new game. I agree that this is a strong deterrent but given how even MMORPG servers have been reversed engineered [1] it's not impossible. If SimCity proves as enduring and as desirable as WoW we may well see it coupled with a LinCity-NG-derived [2] backend or similar. Edit: That said, a powerful stimulus for the development of MMO server emulators was that players dissatisfied with the official servers' community simple couldn't run their own server how they'd like it for whom they like. I assume that the new SimCity is designed to be a far less community-oriented experience and people in control of the neighboring cities are largely replaceable from a player's perspective. [1] See http://www.runuo.com/ http://www.runuo.com/, http://www.galaxiesreborn.com/ http://www.galaxiesreborn.com/, https://launchpad.net/aurora-runescape-server-emulator https://launchpad.net/aurora-runescape-server-emulator, http://arcemu.org/ http://arcemu.org/, etc. Note how many of those are community FOSS projects, even though running them with an official client is almost always a ToS violation. [2] http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
    • networked 14y ago
      I've got to point out that my previous remark about a LinCity-NG back end was made half-jokingly and now that I've noticed that's not really obvious it's too late to go back and edit the comment. The difference between how your city is represented in SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4, on which LinCity-NG is based, and the new SimCity is quite profound and I thought I'd explain it further. First, the new layout engine finally allows you to construct roads at arbitrary angles and not just along the axes. This makes it fundamentally incompatible with the old grid-based map format used in SimCity since version one with few alternations [1]. Then there's the agent model of economics [2], a change from previous games' broad statistical model, that seems to be deeply integrated with the game's visualization. [1] The biggest change was likely the introduction of varying terrain height in SimCity 2000. [2] The developers give a brief explanation in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz-UGPRilUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz-UGPRilUE. Looks like they've done some pretty interesting things with it.
    • 14y ago
  • ececconi 14y ago
    How much of D3's processing is done offloaded? Are there any articles online that I could read about this?
    • vyrotek 14y ago
      Originally they told us quite a bit of logic was done on their servers. But then they announced that Diablo 3 would be playable offline on the PlayStation 4. Now I don't know what to believe. Could it be it was all just talk to stop us from trying?
      • reitzensteinm 14y ago
        The servers are almost certainly running from the same source base as the client. Swapping out who-does-what, compared to a console port, is trivial.
      • signed0 14y ago
        Or that the PS4 version is the first variant that has enough functionality built in for it to be playable offline.
        • querulous 14y ago
          they're probably just running the server code on the ps4 alongside the client. it's easier to secure there
      • gambiting 14y ago
        No, item drops are actually done on a server, to guarantee fair drops for everyone(you can sell them for real money, so you would rather make sure nobody just adds an item worth $$$ to their inventory). PS4 won't be connected to the Auction House, so most likely it will include just its own, internal version of the server that will generate item drops.
    • flixic 14y ago
      Map generation, some enemy AI, and most frustratingly: combat action outcomes. My story was the same as numerous other players: started playing hardcore, died not because of a mistake, but because of lag (internet lagged for a few seconds, that was enough for monsters to kill me, when internet came back moments later I was told I died). At that moment I decided not give ANY more money to Blizzard, and closed my WoW membership.
  • betterunix 14y ago
    "With enough processing offloaded to the server, would-be pirates need to write something that's almost a whole new game." Sure, and with sufficient bandwidth and computational power you could actually hide all the game logic using a secure computation protocol. Only a complete idiot would do that for something as performance-intensive as a video game. The problem here is that we do not have reliable or fast Internet connections. As soon as your connection has a burp, or you get hit with some bufferbloat, or half your neighborhood starts streaming the Super Bowl in 1080p, your game starts to play worse. What EA failed to realize here is that the best way to make money in games is to offer a superior online gaming platform, not to try to sell individual games as products. Microsoft figured that out with XBox Live a long time ago.
  • scotty79 14y ago
    Then when company goes belly up games die. Like Hellgate London multiplayer.
  • cdi 14y ago
    >effectively impossible to crack. hack into their servers, steal binaries of game server, modify client to work with local server.
• ghshephard 14y ago
  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 many of those X% can be converted into purchases, and how many of those Y% valid purchases are lost. EA may have tipped the balance here through poor execution and resulted in fewer games being sold, but, I don't work in the game industry - so I don't know how high X normally gets. (50%? 75%? 90%? 95%? I'm sure it's a pretty disheartening number)
  • hayksaakian 14y ago
    For many of the X%, purchasing was not a consideration; what's more useful to consider is how many people that were paying customers in the past STOP paying, given that they've demonstrated their willingness to pay.
  • 001sky 14y ago
    Also a consideration: 866 reviews and a "1-Star" average.
  • pc86 14y ago
    A lot of games are copied, but it's a fallacy to assume that pirating a game means you won't buy it, or that attempting to pirate a game and being prevented (by DRM or some other means) means you'll buy it instead. In college I pirated games quite a bit. I never bought one, nor would I have.
    • ghshephard 14y ago
      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 millions of dollars, and, at $70/pop, need about 6-10 million purchases to make up for the flops that will also occur. The real problem, is that if it's _really_ easy to copy, and the company puts in no attempts to prevent this, then a lot of the people who would have purchased the game, don't bother and just download off the torrents. Tough balancing act. I don't know what the answer is.
• res0nat0r 14y ago
  So there was a big server meltdown during the Diablo 3 launch, is this the same thing? I'm not sure how long the Sim City servers have been down but is this just initial launch problems? I'm surprised Amazon has done this as they didn't do the same for D3. How long have logins been totall down for now? Also I think it would be helpful for reviews like this on Amazon and Spore to restrict the reviews to only verified purchases. People submitting 1 star reviews because they require you to be online just because they don't like it shouldn't be allowed to submit a rating.
  • pc86 14y ago
    The short version is that the server performance for SC was so bad that EA took them down for maintenance. The maintenance message also had an error in it, something to the effect of "Servers will return at <string>"
  • caligo 14y ago
    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 problems in South Korea because of connectivity. My hopes is that incidents like this force companies to move away from the online only single player design. I think that aside from the philosophical problems with DRM in general, the required internet connection aspect means that once EA shuts down the server the game could be lost forever. When making these games (good or bad) a team adds something to the cultural record of our time. Old movies may not be as good as modern movies in terms of technical execution, but they are interesting because they contain within them an aspect of a lost culture. Games should aspire to do the same.
    • bluedanieru 14y ago
      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.
• ineedtosleep 14y ago
  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.
  • aqme28 14y ago
    Battlefield 3 is a bad comparison because it's intrinsically a multiplayer franchise. No one complains that they need an internet connection to play World of Warcraft, because it's expected. Additionally, BF3 had an offline single-player mode. SimCity could have an offline single-player mode, but elected not to.
  • pc86 14y ago
    I've seen pirated copies of (single-player only) BF3. What about the DRM is so different between that and Sim City?
    • tobyjsullivan 14y ago
      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.
      • nwh 14y ago
        It doesn't. The game can survive without a connection for 20 minutes. The only logic run on their servers is save/load.
        • jaredmcateer 14y ago
          Anything that happens at the region level requires the servers.
    • dylangs1030 14y ago
• tobyjsullivan 14y ago
  That would probably be wonderful but it's not going to happen. They'll take a look at what went wrong "this time" and be convinced they will not make the same mistakes next time. Then they'll try again. Too their credit, that's the definition of good business and, chances are, it will work better next time. Some companies are just better than others at getting it right the first time (or second, or third). I just wish this hadn't happened with SimCity. I really liked that title.
  • Macsenour 14y ago
    Knowing some in charge, I can say only this: Karma.