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This was dreadful and embarrassing to read through. Zero new information, no apologies, just dodging. > You can pop from work to home, play the game and have y

This was dreadful and embarrassing to read through. Zero new information, no apologies, just dodging. > You can pop from work to home, play the game and have your cities available to you anywhere. "Anywhere" there's an internet connection, "anytime" their servers are up. You want to claim its an MMO? You want to claim game-as-a-service? Fine. But sell it as that, charge me $15 a month for an ephemeral product. Not $60 for something I can't even use on my own time. edit: The point of the last statement isn't to compare it to an MMO, the point is that EA are not upfront about the odds of the game itself being very ephemeral. I'm not sad I can't buy it for $15. I'm sad that its quite possible in just 2 years time that no one can.

fuuuuuuuuuuu 14y ago
If they charged you $15 per month, they'd have to refund you for the fact it's been down a significant portion of the month; I mean, can you imagine the shitshow if WoW were down for a week and Blizzard just kept charging people (and gave no credit)? This way they can pretend they aren't just taking your money and completely failing to deliver a viable product on the timing promised.
- itafroma 14y ago
  Funny you should mention WoW: its launch was arguably much worse than SimCity's, lasting far longer (it took a good month or two to settle down). If you do a search for "wow launch disaster" or "wow launch 2004", you'll find a number of message boards with the same type of anger and frustration demonstrated with the SimCity launch. And they did that not only charging full retail price, but a $15/month subscription fee. Of course, "first month free" is the standard practice in the MMORPG market, allowing for some leeway, but they did give a few days credit here and there. Blizzard, however, did have a fair amount of social capital that EA may not have and got through it moving into 2005. Social media wasn't anything near it is today, either: no Reddit, no Hacker News, no Twitter, and Facebook was just getting off the ground being open to colleges only.
  - darkarmani 14y ago
    You are going to compare a launch 9 years ago to what is acceptable today? Besides, the whole point of WoW was that it wasn't going to be single-player. Sims could avoid the server meltdowns by having a single player mode.
    - itafroma 14y ago
      Where did I comment on or compare the acceptability of either? GGP mentioned the hypothetical outrage that would occur if WoW was unavailable for a week: well, surprise, it actually did fail, repeatedly, and not just for a week—but for weeks on end—during its launch. And just like SimCity, there was a large amount of justified outrage. It's simply historical context: we don't need to imagine the so-called "shitshow" because it actually happened.
xymostech 14y ago
Guild Wars 2 sells an actual MMO as a one-time fee, and they're doing just swell. I've heard most people claim that as one of its benefits, not a downside. Not sure what that means, just wanted to point out that people often do enjoy single-fee game-as-a-services. Also, when you say "$60 for something I can't even use on my own time" are you claiming that the game doesn't even work, as all of the hyped up gaming articles are claiming? I've been watching someone stream the game for the past week and a half, and he's been doing just fine, playing consistently for about 8 hours a day, each day since the release. So, sure, there are some problems with it, but it's not like the game is so horribly broken that you can't use it.
- minimaxir 14y ago
  Guild Wars 2 fan here. It's worth noting that GW2 has a substantial amount of non-trivial in-game purchases to subsidize the persistent costs of maintaining the servers in lieu of an online fee, and some game design is specifically tailored to provide incentives for players to make these purchases.
  - xymostech 14y ago
    That is a good point. I've avoided it, so I forgot that it can be a large part of the game. However, one could argue that Maxis will likely be releasing DLC/Expansion packs for Sim City (seeing as they've done this for every other Sim game they've made) so those can be a substitute for the online fee as well. I guess time will tell.
    - ijk 14y ago
      They were planning to (there's already lots of stuff in the Collector's Edition that's also available as DLC). But they were planning to do that with Spore too, and that didn't turn out so well.
- ijk 14y ago
  "It works for this one guy I know" is not really data. I think the real problem, though, is that EA has been treating this as a boxed product launch, not a service, and then acting shocked when they have service-type problems. If they had really treated it as a service, internally, they would have done things that might have prevented this, like doing a soft-launch, actual beta stress testing, having transparently scalable servers, etc.
jarcoal 14y ago
Your point makes no sense. If they charged you a monthly amount, you'd be ok with it? They did say it would be online-only long before launch, so anyone who paid for it knew what they were getting in to.
- k3n 14y ago
  Yeah that doesn't make much sense, because most MMO's are going to run you at least $50 initially, and then you pay the monthly fee in addition. I highly doubt that's what anyone would want at least with the game in its current form -- it'd need regular content updates, which I'm not even sure if they could add anything else of substantive value to a game like SimCity.
DannyBee 14y ago
I actually don't understand why they would release a statement like this. It does nothing but stoke the flames.

fuuuuuuuuuuu 14y ago

If they charged you $15 per month, they'd have to refund you for the fact it's been down a significant portion of the month; I mean, can you imagine the shitshow if WoW were down for a week and Blizzard just kept charging people (and gave no credit)? This way they can pretend they aren't just taking your money and completely failing to deliver a viable product on the timing promised.

itafroma 14y ago
Funny you should mention WoW: its launch was arguably much worse than SimCity's, lasting far longer (it took a good month or two to settle down). If you do a search for "wow launch disaster" or "wow launch 2004", you'll find a number of message boards with the same type of anger and frustration demonstrated with the SimCity launch. And they did that not only charging full retail price, but a $15/month subscription fee. Of course, "first month free" is the standard practice in the MMORPG market, allowing for some leeway, but they did give a few days credit here and there. Blizzard, however, did have a fair amount of social capital that EA may not have and got through it moving into 2005. Social media wasn't anything near it is today, either: no Reddit, no Hacker News, no Twitter, and Facebook was just getting off the ground being open to colleges only.
- darkarmani 14y ago
  You are going to compare a launch 9 years ago to what is acceptable today? Besides, the whole point of WoW was that it wasn't going to be single-player. Sims could avoid the server meltdowns by having a single player mode.
  - itafroma 14y ago
    Where did I comment on or compare the acceptability of either? GGP mentioned the hypothetical outrage that would occur if WoW was unavailable for a week: well, surprise, it actually did fail, repeatedly, and not just for a week—but for weeks on end—during its launch. And just like SimCity, there was a large amount of justified outrage. It's simply historical context: we don't need to imagine the so-called "shitshow" because it actually happened.

xymostech 14y ago

Guild Wars 2 sells an actual MMO as a one-time fee, and they're doing just swell. I've heard most people claim that as one of its benefits, not a downside. Not sure what that means, just wanted to point out that people often do enjoy single-fee game-as-a-services. Also, when you say "$60 for something I can't even use on my own time" are you claiming that the game doesn't even work, as all of the hyped up gaming articles are claiming? I've been watching someone stream the game for the past week and a half, and he's been doing just fine, playing consistently for about 8 hours a day, each day since the release. So, sure, there are some problems with it, but it's not like the game is so horribly broken that you can't use it.

minimaxir 14y ago
Guild Wars 2 fan here. It's worth noting that GW2 has a substantial amount of non-trivial in-game purchases to subsidize the persistent costs of maintaining the servers in lieu of an online fee, and some game design is specifically tailored to provide incentives for players to make these purchases.
- xymostech 14y ago
  That is a good point. I've avoided it, so I forgot that it can be a large part of the game. However, one could argue that Maxis will likely be releasing DLC/Expansion packs for Sim City (seeing as they've done this for every other Sim game they've made) so those can be a substitute for the online fee as well. I guess time will tell.
  - ijk 14y ago
    They were planning to (there's already lots of stuff in the Collector's Edition that's also available as DLC). But they were planning to do that with Spore too, and that didn't turn out so well.
ijk 14y ago
"It works for this one guy I know" is not really data. I think the real problem, though, is that EA has been treating this as a boxed product launch, not a service, and then acting shocked when they have service-type problems. If they had really treated it as a service, internally, they would have done things that might have prevented this, like doing a soft-launch, actual beta stress testing, having transparently scalable servers, etc.

jarcoal 14y ago

Your point makes no sense. If they charged you a monthly amount, you'd be ok with it? They did say it would be online-only long before launch, so anyone who paid for it knew what they were getting in to.

k3n 14y ago
Yeah that doesn't make much sense, because most MMO's are going to run you at least $50 initially, and then you pay the monthly fee in addition. I highly doubt that's what anyone would want at least with the game in its current form -- it'd need regular content updates, which I'm not even sure if they could add anything else of substantive value to a game like SimCity.

DannyBee 14y ago

I actually don't understand why they would release a statement like this. It does nothing but stoke the flames.