4 ms·

Given the two hour wait I had to talk to a billing advisor to try and buy SimCity yesterday, people are still buying this game in their droves. The problem is t

Given the two hour wait I had to talk to a billing advisor to try and buy SimCity yesterday, people are still buying this game in their droves. The problem is that there is no incentive for EA to listen to their customers - the monopoly that they have on many of the best franchises allows them to act in such a petulant and anticompetitive manner. I hate to be the one to say this, but I really can't see this issue being resolved without regulation.

jrajav 14y ago
Let's see how long that lasts. It sounds like this time around is different from being unable to cancel subscriptions, or a multiplayer server going down - people who bought the game at release actually cannot play it, or encounter major functionality breaks while doing so. I know that it may be unlikely, but I do hope that this affects their bottom line. EA is a toxic company inside and out.
- seferphier 14y ago
  It could last quite a while. Look at the COD franchise. I was a big fan of COD4. They ignored their community for a long time and each new edition is still selling like hotcakes.
- hsmyers 14y ago
  Regarding your comment of toxicity inside---when was this? Is this from personnel experience? Reason I ask is that 'toxic' is counter to my experience while working for them. Had a great time working with an equally great team. No pointy hairs in sight. That however was in 93 and things may well have changed.
  - benparsons 14y ago
    1993? Probably fair to say a lot has changed in the last 20 years! I don't really follow EA closely, but even so they have a poor image (of what it's like internally.) Google "EA spouse" for a start, the resulting material presents them in a very poor light, even in the (poor) context of the games industry.
  - jrajav 14y ago
    I have no personal experience, so I'll defer to yours, but my impression comes from stories like this one: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
  - speeder 14y ago
    I never worked for EA, but I know people. 1993 EA has nothing to do with EA from 1996 onwards... EA screwed Origin (that then they already owned, just read stuff about development of Ultima 8 and 9... there are lots of documents about how executive meddling made U8 a meh game, and U9 a totally ruined game), then bought and ruined Westwood, and so on. Also as the time passed they got more and more problems with employees. Then we had crazy shit, like when EA closed a studio in LA, and people found out that the studio had more middle managers than grunts, and this is why the studio could not decide what to do, it simply had so much people giving orders and so few people doing, that doing stuff was impossible. The EA that wrote this: http://chrishecker.com/Can_a_Computer_Make_You_Cry%3F http://chrishecker.com/Can_a_Computer_Make_You_Cry%3F doesn't exist anymore.
    - anonymous 14y ago
      Can you elaborate on what happened in '96? EA have been on my "pirate their games if you really MUST see them yourself" list for a decade at least. However, I wasn't really a gamer back in '93-'96, so I don't know how they used to be and how they changed.
      - speeder 14y ago
        I never tried to track what happened exactly, or why. But their games back then start to suffer from lots of executive meddling, with EA interfering more and more on the artistry of their game authors. My best guess it is related to the launch of Playstation in late 1995, spurring a race for 3D games and FMV games, requiring much more money than before, and thus requiring more "risk management."
  - zipdog 14y ago
    I've been with an EA studio for the last five months and met with people from a dozen other EA studios and like you toxic is not a word I would use to describe the EA I have seen. Quite the opposite
  - JackpotDen 14y ago
    "That however was in 93 and things may well have changed." There's your problem. At some point EA started buying up studios to take the IP and fire the employees. Then they went on a micro purchase bender and got rid of any idea of respecting the customer.
- waps 14y ago
  So pay with credit card, then if someone pulls this crap call your bank and file a "product not as advertised/doesn't work" complaint ? That will effectively make business impossible for them if even 0.1% of buyers do this, and it doesn't cost any customer anything. Plus the banks have incentive to side with the customer, not EA. EA absolutely needs them, but customers can easily run to a different bank.
  - Deestan 14y ago
    > So pay with credit card, then if someone pulls this crap call your bank and file a "product not as advertised/doesn't work" complaint ? If you try this with Steam, they flag you for fraud and shut down your without recourse. All previously bought games are lost. If you try this with Amazon, they flag you for fraud and shut down your account without recourse. Your previously bought e-books are automatically deleted from all your devices.
    - jellicle 14y ago
      At which point you should sue them in small claims court.
      - res0nat0r 14y ago
        Or do what most tech savvy people on this forum who know about all of these standard launch day problems should be doing IMO. Wait a few weeks until after launch for things to calm down, monitor the status updates on the website and when the scalability issues are resolved then buy the game and happily play with minor problems for the next 5 years.
        sukuriant 14y ago
        That said, it's going to be kinda funny if this was simply a minor bug that was discovered when scale went up to a few hundred BETA-testers to a couple million players. Maybe whatever load-testing code they had written that said they were good-to-go missed a single (or few) "insignificant" functions that ended up, because of this bug, over-running the server. I certainly don't like EA's DRM practices and some of their other practices, but now that I'm another day into the future, I could easily see this happening to any company as well-used as them. Addendum: Startups that claim they don't/wouldn't have these sorts of problems are probably because their load comes slowly, steadily, and these problems are caught early, or refactored out for efficiency, and the developers miss the potentially catastrophic results. When you get hit by a LOAD of traffic all at once, or other similar thing, bad things happen. See: Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, Half Life 2: Deathmatch
pc86 14y ago
Because I'm sure EA doesn't have money for lobbyists. All regulation would do is cement EA's position as legal or even required.

jrajav 14y ago

Let's see how long that lasts. It sounds like this time around is different from being unable to cancel subscriptions, or a multiplayer server going down - people who bought the game at release actually cannot play it, or encounter major functionality breaks while doing so. I know that it may be unlikely, but I do hope that this affects their bottom line. EA is a toxic company inside and out.

seferphier 14y ago
It could last quite a while. Look at the COD franchise. I was a big fan of COD4. They ignored their community for a long time and each new edition is still selling like hotcakes.
hsmyers 14y ago
Regarding your comment of toxicity inside---when was this? Is this from personnel experience? Reason I ask is that 'toxic' is counter to my experience while working for them. Had a great time working with an equally great team. No pointy hairs in sight. That however was in 93 and things may well have changed.
- benparsons 14y ago
  1993? Probably fair to say a lot has changed in the last 20 years! I don't really follow EA closely, but even so they have a poor image (of what it's like internally.) Google "EA spouse" for a start, the resulting material presents them in a very poor light, even in the (poor) context of the games industry.
- jrajav 14y ago
  I have no personal experience, so I'll defer to yours, but my impression comes from stories like this one: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
- speeder 14y ago
  I never worked for EA, but I know people. 1993 EA has nothing to do with EA from 1996 onwards... EA screwed Origin (that then they already owned, just read stuff about development of Ultima 8 and 9... there are lots of documents about how executive meddling made U8 a meh game, and U9 a totally ruined game), then bought and ruined Westwood, and so on. Also as the time passed they got more and more problems with employees. Then we had crazy shit, like when EA closed a studio in LA, and people found out that the studio had more middle managers than grunts, and this is why the studio could not decide what to do, it simply had so much people giving orders and so few people doing, that doing stuff was impossible. The EA that wrote this: http://chrishecker.com/Can_a_Computer_Make_You_Cry%3F http://chrishecker.com/Can_a_Computer_Make_You_Cry%3F doesn't exist anymore.
  - anonymous 14y ago
    Can you elaborate on what happened in '96? EA have been on my "pirate their games if you really MUST see them yourself" list for a decade at least. However, I wasn't really a gamer back in '93-'96, so I don't know how they used to be and how they changed.
    - speeder 14y ago
      I never tried to track what happened exactly, or why. But their games back then start to suffer from lots of executive meddling, with EA interfering more and more on the artistry of their game authors. My best guess it is related to the launch of Playstation in late 1995, spurring a race for 3D games and FMV games, requiring much more money than before, and thus requiring more "risk management."
- zipdog 14y ago
  I've been with an EA studio for the last five months and met with people from a dozen other EA studios and like you toxic is not a word I would use to describe the EA I have seen. Quite the opposite
- JackpotDen 14y ago
  "That however was in 93 and things may well have changed." There's your problem. At some point EA started buying up studios to take the IP and fire the employees. Then they went on a micro purchase bender and got rid of any idea of respecting the customer.
waps 14y ago
So pay with credit card, then if someone pulls this crap call your bank and file a "product not as advertised/doesn't work" complaint ? That will effectively make business impossible for them if even 0.1% of buyers do this, and it doesn't cost any customer anything. Plus the banks have incentive to side with the customer, not EA. EA absolutely needs them, but customers can easily run to a different bank.
- Deestan 14y ago
  > So pay with credit card, then if someone pulls this crap call your bank and file a "product not as advertised/doesn't work" complaint ? If you try this with Steam, they flag you for fraud and shut down your without recourse. All previously bought games are lost. If you try this with Amazon, they flag you for fraud and shut down your account without recourse. Your previously bought e-books are automatically deleted from all your devices.
  - jellicle 14y ago
    At which point you should sue them in small claims court.
    - res0nat0r 14y ago
      Or do what most tech savvy people on this forum who know about all of these standard launch day problems should be doing IMO. Wait a few weeks until after launch for things to calm down, monitor the status updates on the website and when the scalability issues are resolved then buy the game and happily play with minor problems for the next 5 years.
      - sukuriant 14y ago
        That said, it's going to be kinda funny if this was simply a minor bug that was discovered when scale went up to a few hundred BETA-testers to a couple million players. Maybe whatever load-testing code they had written that said they were good-to-go missed a single (or few) "insignificant" functions that ended up, because of this bug, over-running the server. I certainly don't like EA's DRM practices and some of their other practices, but now that I'm another day into the future, I could easily see this happening to any company as well-used as them. Addendum: Startups that claim they don't/wouldn't have these sorts of problems are probably because their load comes slowly, steadily, and these problems are caught early, or refactored out for efficiency, and the developers miss the potentially catastrophic results. When you get hit by a LOAD of traffic all at once, or other similar thing, bad things happen. See: Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, Half Life 2: Deathmatch

pc86 14y ago

Because I'm sure EA doesn't have money for lobbyists. All regulation would do is cement EA's position as legal or even required.