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The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went Away

443 points by Vekz 13y ago

dimitar 13y ago
I blame the over-reliance of the journalism profession on PR to get stories. Few bother to do their research nowadays and access to celebrities, company spokespeople and officials are prised more than actually useful information. You can see it in also in politics, science reporting. RPS actually looks pretty good with this - maybe the web can provide a solution to this question? PR and paid publications are ultimately boring, even with the best efforts put in by professionals. If opinion and reporting find a better way of getting monetised on the Internet we may see solution for the boring, corrupt and uninformative media we have today.
- mtgx 13y ago
  Yeah, I dislike the websites' reliance on PR, too. Some of the stories are so obviously copy pasted from the press release. For example when Intel launches a PR with a headline like "Intel Launches Amazing New Chip", 90% of the tech sites out there are like "Intel Launches Awesome New Chip" or something along those lines, and then proceed to basically rewrite's Intel press release. No critical thinking involved. They do this with many other stories, too, especially the ones they don't understand that much. They basically become a distribution service for their press releases.
JacobAldridge 13y ago
I facilitated a workshop recently where one of the speakers specialised in, among other things, crisis PR. She said that the two best ways to approach most brand attacks were 1) Silence, and this wasn't appreciated enough by brands wanting to respond; and 2) to 'burn' the story by giving access to mid-level news organisations or softer journalists - once they run with the story, it's often 'burnt' for larger / hard-hitting outlets because it's been covered. Definitely won't work for all crises, but was eye-opening to me, and a good lesson to those of us with businesses. Bonus tip: the best / worst time to make a social media complaint is on a Friday night - most businesses don't pay someone to monitor social media on the weekend, and conversely most people interact when they're not at work, so complaints are more likely to go viral without a response for many days.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  I immediately thought of the more serious/alarming crisis PR botch-jobs of late: the Toyota brake-sticking crisis and the Sony Entertainment account info hack. I don't think silence would work in either of these cases, but perhaps 'burning' would?
- bravura 13y ago
  Is burning a story still effective? HuffPo will run a story from a mid-tier news org (AFAIK), and then it will go viral. So it seems this might be a deprecated crisis PR strategy.
  - ghshephard 13y ago
    HuffPo doesn't rise to the level of "mid-tier" - they are definitely less Relevant (at least in the united States) than the mid-50 media outlets, and don't even compare to something like the Top Tier (NYT, WSJ, Tribute, LA Times). For example, from HN Search: Results 1-10 of 493 for http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ Results 1-10 of 12,273 for nytimes.com
    - mseebach 13y ago
      So, my gut feeling says you're right, but your methodology here is wrong: HN aggressively encourages sharing the original story, cutting out any intermediates. HP, for all their reach in making stories go viral, don't actually produce a lot of original content. When something is on NYT, it is generally original.
    - lnanek2 13y ago
      Doesn't really matter how many stories. Matters how many see them and who the people who see them are. If your target market is PC gamers, a viral story from an online site could hit your target audience right where most of them will notice it. Last time I read a times article was when Tesla revealed their stories are fake.
- rmc 13y ago
  Can you expand on the burn thing for those of us who don't know much about pr? Is it just because hard hitting journalists don't like to be second?
finallyposting 13y ago
"That the claims weren't true does not provide room to conclude that [Maxis studio head Lucy] Bradshaw was 'lying' [...] such accusations don't help this discussion." What!? Perhaps part of the reasons evil triumphs in media situations like this is that "good" white knights like the author carry water for people who, like Bradshaw, objectively make the world a worse place. Hanlon's razor is irrelevant here. Regardless of whether Lucy is so stupid/irresponsible that she really didn't know such an essential detail of her studio's feature product or is simply a manipulative sociopath, decency dictates she be replaced.
- dagw 13y ago
  Bradshaw, objectively make the world a worse place I'm a huge Sim City fan and I'm really upset I'm not getting the Sim City game I wanted, but let's keep some perspective here. Bradshaw and anything that EA/Maxis says or does has absolutely no effect one way or the other on the world.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    So, there is no point in them existing then.
  - finallyposting 13y ago
    You're absolutely right. Materially misleading customers about a product is "nothing." If I post my e-mail address, will you put your money where you mouth is and send me five hundred dollars? Afterall, that's only 0.00001% of SimCity's first week sales. It's nothing.
drorweiss 13y ago
I guess crisis PR is exponentially more challenging in today's social media reality. They can't just talk to a bunch of reporters to bury a story.
gsibble 13y ago
Those pictures freak me out.
- tacticus 13y ago
  SILENCE WILL FALL. I must say The Silence are a rather awesome enemy for the doctor.
  - Ygg2 13y ago
    I think you are wrong, those are just middle ranked PR division in EA.
    - DanWaterworth 13y ago
      The middle ranked PR division in EA is a good enemy for the doctor.
mrmaddog 13y ago
If neither silence nor the truth are options, the third best approach is to wait until there is a larger story in the industry that you can hide behind. Perhaps that was what EA was attempting, but unfortunately no larger scandals have occurred. Being able to ride (and manipulate) news cycles is an incredibly powerful skill.
iuguy 13y ago
It may seem shocking, but this happens throughout industries (and indeed with governments up to a point - the luxury of silence isn't always available).
seldo 13y ago
I think the simpler alternative is that it's just not a very interesting story. A game company trying to cover their asses for a bad launch of an unpopular design lied their asses off. So what? They seem to have got the server issues under control now, and people are enjoying the game, so it's no longer got the power of public anger behind it.
raghavsethi 13y ago
I'd been wondering why all the news suddenly dried up. Illuminating article.
dotx3 13y ago
While the story went away, did the problem for the company? I personally didn't buy SimCity and I know several people that didn't because of what was up in arms at the time. To me the damage is done. I won't bother complaining or yelling. I just won't pay $80 and if certain organisations keep associating themselves with poor releases/games why would anyone keep handing over their money. Especially when you're releasing something like the next SimCity sequel which plays on older gamers' nostalgia, why would people pay for SimCity 2 in a years time if they remember how poorly this one was sent out into the wild?
- djt 13y ago
  I didnt buy it either and I haven't bought any EA games since Origin started. I figure there are a lot of other games out there from businesses I'd rather support. I am confused by people that post on forums and get outraged then buy the games anyway.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- uptown 13y ago
  Same here - decided to save my money. I'd probably have waited for the Mac version anyway (which comes out next month) but there were enough gameplay complaints to convince me it wasn't worth the premium price they were charging. It the price ever falls considerably, maybe I'll re-consider.
shin_lao 13y ago
That might simply related to the fact the SimCity is a failed game, people stopped playing it and moved on. There are bigger news to run.
qapf 13y ago
There is an easier answer in all of this. RPS is out of news and trying to bring back to life a story that got them a lot of clicks. Other than when they are attacking someone, I don't see a lot of RPS links making the rounds.
georgemcbay 13y ago
I can't speak to the media/publishing side of things, but personally I stopped talking about SimCity because I stopped playing it. Looking back at the whole fiasco, I'm positive that the always-online requirement and server overload will forever define the game, but there was a much bigger problem lurking below that issue, which is that the game sucks anyway even if you disregard the early technical issues and the politics around "always-on". It is, IMO, by far the least fun Maxis "Sim" game I've ever played, and that holds even if you include Spore.
- dantheman 13y ago
  Agreed, I really wanted to play the game when it first came out, but then the botched launch & DRM waned my interested. Then the reviews started coming in about how the game wasn't fun and quite limited that I've written it completely off. So now I don't care, I'm not going to purchase the game.
- ghshephard 13y ago
  I concur absolutely with you - I am the worlds great sim fan, and I've lost countless thousands of hours watching my little guys (and gals) run around in Stronghold, Settlers 7, and Caesar 3. I also got a lot of fun in previous Sim City games. The Latest SimCity got about 6 hours out of me, before I just went, "meah." - I didn't really get the same sense of progress, or emergent features, or ownership of the process and events that I get from other sims. But - EA scammed me out of the $60 before I discovered that the game actually sucked, so - maybe it wasn't such a bad strategy on their part after all. But, with that said - this approach (hyping a game, limiting its playtesting, not providing extensive reviewer copies) - only works so many times before people start to get wise to your ways...
  - rubinelli 13y ago
    Personally, I burnt out after Molyneux's Black & White, but recently GoG.com helped me rediscover the classics. If you don't care about fancy 3D graphics, the fun/buck is hard to beat.
    - 13y ago
roel_v 13y ago
The me the kicker was in the comments (one of the first few): "JarinArenos says: I browse plenty of gaming sites… but stories like this are why RPS is the only one that gets AdBlocker disabled" LOL, this is the audience we're talking about here - people who proudly proclaim to the world how they support their causes by gasp disabling AdBlocker! I can see this guy sitting there, basking in his own self-righteousness, how he's such a good guy for allowing some ads (all of which he ignores) to be shown. And then people wonder why companies need to turn to always-online DRM for their software? Ever wondered why the world is turning SaaS-only, with all it's negatives? See it epitomized here. PS thinking of it (and OT), isn't there an AdBlocker version that overlays ads with a white float, rather than not downloading them at all?
- krichman 13y ago
  The world is turning SaaS-only because it's easier to do business when you have predictable monthly income, processes that are easily debuggable because they are only on your platform, and a far simpler customer support scenario (fixing one person's bug is fixing all persons' bugs). SaaS is basically wholly unrelated to blocking ads. What should this guy do to meet your approval? Unblock and click every ad? AdBlock gives users more power to enter into agreements with websites that are respectful with their users' attention and reject websites that are not. Use a website occasionally? Add them to the whitelist. Meanwhile you never notice the scummy websites that have giant ads mid-article nor the 20-year-olds in your area trying to meet you for sex.
smutticus 13y ago
I'm quite glad the story went away. Some company released a crappy product and people got angry. Why? Just don't buy it. It's not as if EA has redeemed themselves in any way. SimCity still has a 1.9 score on Metacritic. The public still agrees this game is a failure and their sales will reflect that.
- NamTaf 13y ago
  A number of reasons: 1) People pre-ordered, but didn't find out about the crippling problems until after installing it. By that time, they'd opened it. People are used to servers being overwhelmed for a few hours right on launch day. After that's passed and the problem persists, the whole thing is too late. 2) EA was refusing refunds of digital downloads. [1] 3) Even if you subscribed to their crap and waited for them to fix it, the game still exhibited crippling flaws which they refused or took ages to address, for example with the game's pathfinding system [2]. I am sure there were other issues that people faced but not being someone who actually fell in to the Simcity trap, I didn't follow it any more closely. In short, the whole 'just don't buy it' attitude does not work as it's a naive view that completely ignores several key parts of the puzzle. Importantly, those key parts of the puzzle all involve the power resting in EA's hands where the consumers have little leverage to affect change. EA already had their money and had disclaimers on not needing to offer refunds, so the approach of shut up and let the problem go away was fine for them. [1] https://help.ea.com/article/returns-and-cancellations https://help.ea.com/article/returns-and-cancellations [2] http://games.on.net/2013/03/maxis-to-address-simcity-pathfinding-complaints-as-more-bugs-are-found/ http://games.on.net/2013/03/maxis-to-address-simcity-pathfin...
  - marcosdumay 13y ago
    In a sane market, people would learn not to preorder after something like that. Nut games isn't a sne market. Most people with experience on it move away.
- ghshephard 13y ago
  It's not just that the company released a crappy product - it's that they also "didn't tell the truth" about it. Their Always-On DRM was explained at varying times as either (A) Part of the compute process (untrue), or (B) Part of their MMO strategy - which given the almost complete lack of socialization in the game, makes no sense whatsoever. Should they be held accountable for their words/actions?
Tichy 13y ago
Maybe it just wasn't a very intetresting story. Gamers had to wait a couple of days for EA to fix their servers. Not very shocking at all.
- ghshephard 13y ago
  The issue was more the fact that they had Always On DRM built into the game, and didn't tell the full truth about what it was there for.
  - Tichy 13y ago
    You mean like every game on Steam.
    - ghshephard 13y ago
      Has Steam ever claimed that their DRM (where it's used) is either for (A) Offline compute, or (B) MMO use? Personally, it's not so much the DRM that EA has infected their latest games with, or not even so much that it requires a constant internet connection (though, Sim City was one of the great play-alone games left) - but that they've been too cowardly too just come out and say, "Yes, we require you to be connected to the internet to play this game so that we can reduce piracy." Lying (or not telling the truth) about this obvious situation only makes them look bad.
    - verbatim 13y ago
      Not all games sold on Steam use DRM. See: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_games_on_steam/page1 http://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_games_on_st...
    - vor_ 13y ago
      Many games on Steam can be played in offline modes. Maxis claimed there was extensive server-side processing that required SimCity's online connectivity, but this was proven to be an exaggeration. In addition to a lack of local saving/loading, players have been losing their cities due to processing errors.
PakG1 13y ago
When I looked at the big hubbub about Yahoo's decision to end telecommuting, I couldn't help but think that Mayer was making the right decision by not commenting. She was hired to turn around a company in crisis, there were major problems, and she based her decision on data (seeing that many people who were supposed to work via VPN weren't even logging in according to their VPN records). It was clearly a unique decision for a unique situation and not a comment on telecommuting in general, despite what all the screamers were screaming. Judging from various comments from alleged insiders, it was a good decision because many of the telecommuters were just loafers. Fact is, who cares what the screamers were screaming? Would people boycott Yahoo's products because they ended telecommuting? This so cannot be compared to buying products made in sweatshops, which many people clearly did for years anyway (and still do). Would employees stop wanting to work at Yahoo? Apparently, job applications are way up, including what industry considers top tier candidates. When you make the right decision, sometimes the best option is to stay quiet and let the truth come out naturally. Of course, OP is more about the strategy in general, not whether or not the truth comes out naturally (in fact, in OP, they cared not for truth). I'm just saying I felt throughout the whole Yahoo telecommuting thing, Mayer did the right thing. Screw the screamers. They had no idea what they were talking about and wouldn't affect Yahoo in any way anyway.
- venomsnake 13y ago
  Nothing boosts the morale of a company in crisis than having a boss that rules with decrees instead of leading.
  - PakG1 13y ago
    I'd love to hear a confirmed insider's view. Because I've ONLY heard good buzz about what they've been up to. Everything has been anonymous sources only (albeit many from journalists who promised anonymity), but I've yet to see any anonymous upset sources. It really seems like Yahoo's got swagger back. So I'd love to hear a confirmed insider's view.
ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
That's not "silence", that's the power of the "2 week give-a-damn limit". In today's society we're overwhelmed with constantly breaking news from all over the world. People tend to forget about things after about 2 weeks. There's just so many new things to care about that it's impossible to not move on from old news. Especially when it's just about a game. I'm sure gamers will keep the Sim City fiasco in the back of their minds and pirate later games published by EA but for now, we're really just tired of hearing about old news. Same thing happened with the whole "WarZ" fiasco. That team had false advertising on Steam, a glitched game released, artwork from the walking dead was stolen, bug reporters banned from the forums and censored. It was a lot worse than SimCity, yet 2 weeks later we just stopped caring. It's a shitty game, moving on, lets focus on something more important, like plastic in our oceans.
- Goronmon 13y ago
  There's just so many new things to care about that it's impossible to not move on from old news. Especially when it's just about a game. I'm sure gamers will keep the Sim City fiasco in the back of their minds and pirate later games published by EA but for now, we're really just tired of hearing about old news. Yeah, I think this about sums it up. When it comes down to it, all that happened is that a company made a bad game. Companies have been doing this for many years and will continue to do so for as long as the medium exists. If anything, this whole SimCity fiasco has made me less of a fan of RPS in general. It felt like half their site was dedicated to bad-mouthing the game and EA for the first week or so after release. And, of course, they need to throw out a piece like this after a while to generate page views and remind us how terribly angry we should be that such a tragedy could have been allowed to happen.
  - onli 13y ago
    You misrepresent what happened severely. It isn't the case that this is simply about a bad game. This is about a game which didn't work for the people buying it. Which got great previews and reviews(!) before the issues with their servers arised. And which wasn't even a good game, because it was fundamentally flawed, which at the beginning remained undiscovered. Furthermore, this is not even about the game at all. It is about the crisis management of EA/Maxis, who simply lied (I doesn't care whether she lied or not, in effect it was a lie) when claiming that the Always-On-DRM, which prevented people from playing the game, was necessary to run the game at all because of server-side calculations. I think RPS is right to make a story out of this fact. Companies who get away lying their customers and the press should feel consequences of this. All too often, and in EAs case this seems to me especially true, companies who behave unethical create a growing mass of disgruntled players not respecting, and not buying from, that company anymore, which the company can ignore for quite a while when focusing only on quarterly results (and given the arrival of new players all the time), until the negative image becomes so overwhelming that their customer-base collapses.
sjtgraham 13y ago
This reminds me of the Instagram TOS fiasco. Instagram essentially was burned very badly by doing the right thing, i.e. by being extraordinarily forthright about changing their terms. Usually TOS provide the company the ability to change their terms without any notice whatsoever; we are somewhat unreasonably expected to regularly check back ourselves and try to find changes. Instagram tried to do right by their users by clearly communicating upcoming and significant changes that would affect their users, and the Internet collectively and unilaterally sh*t the bed. I remember thinking they were crazy for doing that, because it was obvious exactly how it would play out. Sometimes doing the right thing is the wrong thing. Unfortunately sometimes silence is golden.
- acdha 13y ago
  Instagram was burned for telling a story about their ToS which didn't match what they wanted to claim and then tried a classic non-apology apology rather than admitting overreach. If the new ToS had only claimed what they said they wanted this never would have blown up.
Aqueous 13y ago
Why did the SimCity story go away? Because the story isn't that important
macspoofing 13y ago
Or the story didn't have that much mileage to be begin with. After all, it's just a game, in a sea of other games.
bentcorner 13y ago
I don't think it really went away, at least for the fans at http://www.reddit.com/r/simcity http://www.reddit.com/r/simcity. It's like a constant steady flow of hate on there, such that I actually feel bad for Maxis after reading a few posts.
crazy1van 13y ago
I think the power of silence depends on the severity of the crisis. If your product is physically harming people or cost someone a lot of money, the controversy probably isn't going away after a few weeks of silence. People will not forget about a loved one being seriously physically or financially harmed. However, if the issue is a buggy piece of software that costs $60, that is going to be quickly forgotten. People don't have the energy to stay upset about something that in the grand scheme of things is so minor. If this is still registering on your personal radar a month later as a serious problem, consider yourself lucky.
executive 13y ago
The Power Of Silence: Why The Linode Story Went Away
tomphoolery 13y ago
I would be interested to know about "why" this whole debacle happened, but much later after I actually get to play the game. I love SimCity, loved almost every single version that Maxis has released, but this latest offering got me scared. So from others out there who play the game...is it even usable at this point?
- tempaccount9473 13y ago
  Usually I'd say pirate it, put 10 hours into it, and buy it to support the authors if you like it. But right now, you can't play the new Simcity without shovelling dollars into EA's pocket, and reward them for producing a fundementally broken game. You just have to decide for yourself which is more important to you. Providing feedback to bad corporate behavior by refusing to give EA your money, or your curiosity to play (and ultimately be disappointed by) a shitty sim with all depth and complexity removed in favor of "social" interaction and microtransactions (buy packs of 2 buildings for $5, i.e. http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-German-City-Online-Game/dp/B00BLS4H22 http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-German-City-Online-Game/dp/B00...). However, if you care about the future of games, please don't give EA money.
andrewljohnson 13y ago
When I heard all the negative press around SimCity, I became nostalgic for my childhood, and bought SimCity for iPod. I've really enjoyed playing it twice. Even though the controls are different, I picked up the knack right away.
jdechko 13y ago
Unfortunately, EA holds a position where they can ignore the complaints of fans. Fans of Sim City, Diablo, etc are the minority of their customers and they can treat us however they want to. Let's face it, Madden '13 and NCAA '13 will sell way more copies than Sim City has. Why should EA give a crap about a few stories on the internet?
diminoten 13y ago
This is also true for getting attacked personally on the Internet. If you're getting hit hard by say, 4chan, because they think you did something terrible or whatever, completely ignoring the personal attacks goes a long way towards stopping them.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
danalmeida 13y ago
It may have made the story go away, but I personally never purchased SimCity because of it. Several times I considered buying it to pass some time then remembered the horrible press and never followed through. It certainly stuck around, its just in everyone's head now.
rdl 13y ago
Mostly I just stopped caring because I already knew EA was horrible, Origin sucks and people only use it when forced by EA, and SimCity is a crappy game (even independent of the DRM issues). Bioshock: Infinite came out and was good. Other than that, I just sit and wait for Civ V's next expansion, GTA:V, etc.
ekianjo 13y ago
It went away because people don't talk about new games after they are released for a couple of weeks. They whine and then most of them move on and look at other upcoming games.

443 points by Vekz 13y ago

I blame the over-reliance of the journalism profession on PR to get stories. Few bother to do their research nowadays and access to celebrities, company spokespeople and officials are prised more than actually useful information. You can see it in also in politics, science reporting. RPS actually looks pretty good with this - maybe the web can provide a solution to this question? PR and paid publications are ultimately boring, even with the best efforts put in by professionals. If opinion and reporting find a better way of getting monetised on the Internet we may see solution for the boring, corrupt and uninformative media we have today.

mtgx 13y ago
Yeah, I dislike the websites' reliance on PR, too. Some of the stories are so obviously copy pasted from the press release. For example when Intel launches a PR with a headline like "Intel Launches Amazing New Chip", 90% of the tech sites out there are like "Intel Launches Awesome New Chip" or something along those lines, and then proceed to basically rewrite's Intel press release. No critical thinking involved. They do this with many other stories, too, especially the ones they don't understand that much. They basically become a distribution service for their press releases.

JacobAldridge 13y ago

I facilitated a workshop recently where one of the speakers specialised in, among other things, crisis PR. She said that the two best ways to approach most brand attacks were 1) Silence, and this wasn't appreciated enough by brands wanting to respond; and 2) to 'burn' the story by giving access to mid-level news organisations or softer journalists - once they run with the story, it's often 'burnt' for larger / hard-hitting outlets because it's been covered. Definitely won't work for all crises, but was eye-opening to me, and a good lesson to those of us with businesses. Bonus tip: the best / worst time to make a social media complaint is on a Friday night - most businesses don't pay someone to monitor social media on the weekend, and conversely most people interact when they're not at work, so complaints are more likely to go viral without a response for many days.

hkmurakami 13y ago
I immediately thought of the more serious/alarming crisis PR botch-jobs of late: the Toyota brake-sticking crisis and the Sony Entertainment account info hack. I don't think silence would work in either of these cases, but perhaps 'burning' would?
bravura 13y ago
Is burning a story still effective? HuffPo will run a story from a mid-tier news org (AFAIK), and then it will go viral. So it seems this might be a deprecated crisis PR strategy.
- ghshephard 13y ago
  HuffPo doesn't rise to the level of "mid-tier" - they are definitely less Relevant (at least in the united States) than the mid-50 media outlets, and don't even compare to something like the Top Tier (NYT, WSJ, Tribute, LA Times). For example, from HN Search: Results 1-10 of 493 for http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ Results 1-10 of 12,273 for nytimes.com
  - mseebach 13y ago
    So, my gut feeling says you're right, but your methodology here is wrong: HN aggressively encourages sharing the original story, cutting out any intermediates. HP, for all their reach in making stories go viral, don't actually produce a lot of original content. When something is on NYT, it is generally original.
  - lnanek2 13y ago
    Doesn't really matter how many stories. Matters how many see them and who the people who see them are. If your target market is PC gamers, a viral story from an online site could hit your target audience right where most of them will notice it. Last time I read a times article was when Tesla revealed their stories are fake.
rmc 13y ago
Can you expand on the burn thing for those of us who don't know much about pr? Is it just because hard hitting journalists don't like to be second?

finallyposting 13y ago

"That the claims weren't true does not provide room to conclude that [Maxis studio head Lucy] Bradshaw was 'lying' [...] such accusations don't help this discussion." What!? Perhaps part of the reasons evil triumphs in media situations like this is that "good" white knights like the author carry water for people who, like Bradshaw, objectively make the world a worse place. Hanlon's razor is irrelevant here. Regardless of whether Lucy is so stupid/irresponsible that she really didn't know such an essential detail of her studio's feature product or is simply a manipulative sociopath, decency dictates she be replaced.

dagw 13y ago
Bradshaw, objectively make the world a worse place I'm a huge Sim City fan and I'm really upset I'm not getting the Sim City game I wanted, but let's keep some perspective here. Bradshaw and anything that EA/Maxis says or does has absolutely no effect one way or the other on the world.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  So, there is no point in them existing then.
- finallyposting 13y ago
  You're absolutely right. Materially misleading customers about a product is "nothing." If I post my e-mail address, will you put your money where you mouth is and send me five hundred dollars? Afterall, that's only 0.00001% of SimCity's first week sales. It's nothing.

drorweiss 13y ago

I guess crisis PR is exponentially more challenging in today's social media reality. They can't just talk to a bunch of reporters to bury a story.

gsibble 13y ago

Those pictures freak me out.

tacticus 13y ago
SILENCE WILL FALL. I must say The Silence are a rather awesome enemy for the doctor.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  I think you are wrong, those are just middle ranked PR division in EA.
  - DanWaterworth 13y ago
    The middle ranked PR division in EA is a good enemy for the doctor.

mrmaddog 13y ago

If neither silence nor the truth are options, the third best approach is to wait until there is a larger story in the industry that you can hide behind. Perhaps that was what EA was attempting, but unfortunately no larger scandals have occurred. Being able to ride (and manipulate) news cycles is an incredibly powerful skill.

iuguy 13y ago

It may seem shocking, but this happens throughout industries (and indeed with governments up to a point - the luxury of silence isn't always available).

seldo 13y ago

I think the simpler alternative is that it's just not a very interesting story. A game company trying to cover their asses for a bad launch of an unpopular design lied their asses off. So what? They seem to have got the server issues under control now, and people are enjoying the game, so it's no longer got the power of public anger behind it.

raghavsethi 13y ago

I'd been wondering why all the news suddenly dried up. Illuminating article.

dotx3 13y ago

While the story went away, did the problem for the company? I personally didn't buy SimCity and I know several people that didn't because of what was up in arms at the time. To me the damage is done. I won't bother complaining or yelling. I just won't pay $80 and if certain organisations keep associating themselves with poor releases/games why would anyone keep handing over their money. Especially when you're releasing something like the next SimCity sequel which plays on older gamers' nostalgia, why would people pay for SimCity 2 in a years time if they remember how poorly this one was sent out into the wild?

djt 13y ago
I didnt buy it either and I haven't bought any EA games since Origin started. I figure there are a lot of other games out there from businesses I'd rather support. I am confused by people that post on forums and get outraged then buy the games anyway.
- deleted 13y ago
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uptown 13y ago
Same here - decided to save my money. I'd probably have waited for the Mac version anyway (which comes out next month) but there were enough gameplay complaints to convince me it wasn't worth the premium price they were charging. It the price ever falls considerably, maybe I'll re-consider.

shin_lao 13y ago

That might simply related to the fact the SimCity is a failed game, people stopped playing it and moved on. There are bigger news to run.

qapf 13y ago

There is an easier answer in all of this. RPS is out of news and trying to bring back to life a story that got them a lot of clicks. Other than when they are attacking someone, I don't see a lot of RPS links making the rounds.

georgemcbay 13y ago

I can't speak to the media/publishing side of things, but personally I stopped talking about SimCity because I stopped playing it. Looking back at the whole fiasco, I'm positive that the always-online requirement and server overload will forever define the game, but there was a much bigger problem lurking below that issue, which is that the game sucks anyway even if you disregard the early technical issues and the politics around "always-on". It is, IMO, by far the least fun Maxis "Sim" game I've ever played, and that holds even if you include Spore.

dantheman 13y ago
Agreed, I really wanted to play the game when it first came out, but then the botched launch & DRM waned my interested. Then the reviews started coming in about how the game wasn't fun and quite limited that I've written it completely off. So now I don't care, I'm not going to purchase the game.
ghshephard 13y ago
I concur absolutely with you - I am the worlds great sim fan, and I've lost countless thousands of hours watching my little guys (and gals) run around in Stronghold, Settlers 7, and Caesar 3. I also got a lot of fun in previous Sim City games. The Latest SimCity got about 6 hours out of me, before I just went, "meah." - I didn't really get the same sense of progress, or emergent features, or ownership of the process and events that I get from other sims. But - EA scammed me out of the $60 before I discovered that the game actually sucked, so - maybe it wasn't such a bad strategy on their part after all. But, with that said - this approach (hyping a game, limiting its playtesting, not providing extensive reviewer copies) - only works so many times before people start to get wise to your ways...
- rubinelli 13y ago
  Personally, I burnt out after Molyneux's Black & White, but recently GoG.com helped me rediscover the classics. If you don't care about fancy 3D graphics, the fun/buck is hard to beat.
  - 13y ago

roel_v 13y ago

The me the kicker was in the comments (one of the first few): "JarinArenos says: I browse plenty of gaming sites… but stories like this are why RPS is the only one that gets AdBlocker disabled" LOL, this is the audience we're talking about here - people who proudly proclaim to the world how they support their causes by gasp disabling AdBlocker! I can see this guy sitting there, basking in his own self-righteousness, how he's such a good guy for allowing some ads (all of which he ignores) to be shown. And then people wonder why companies need to turn to always-online DRM for their software? Ever wondered why the world is turning SaaS-only, with all it's negatives? See it epitomized here. PS thinking of it (and OT), isn't there an AdBlocker version that overlays ads with a white float, rather than not downloading them at all?

krichman 13y ago
The world is turning SaaS-only because it's easier to do business when you have predictable monthly income, processes that are easily debuggable because they are only on your platform, and a far simpler customer support scenario (fixing one person's bug is fixing all persons' bugs). SaaS is basically wholly unrelated to blocking ads. What should this guy do to meet your approval? Unblock and click every ad? AdBlock gives users more power to enter into agreements with websites that are respectful with their users' attention and reject websites that are not. Use a website occasionally? Add them to the whitelist. Meanwhile you never notice the scummy websites that have giant ads mid-article nor the 20-year-olds in your area trying to meet you for sex.

smutticus 13y ago

I'm quite glad the story went away. Some company released a crappy product and people got angry. Why? Just don't buy it. It's not as if EA has redeemed themselves in any way. SimCity still has a 1.9 score on Metacritic. The public still agrees this game is a failure and their sales will reflect that.

NamTaf 13y ago
A number of reasons: 1) People pre-ordered, but didn't find out about the crippling problems until after installing it. By that time, they'd opened it. People are used to servers being overwhelmed for a few hours right on launch day. After that's passed and the problem persists, the whole thing is too late. 2) EA was refusing refunds of digital downloads. [1] 3) Even if you subscribed to their crap and waited for them to fix it, the game still exhibited crippling flaws which they refused or took ages to address, for example with the game's pathfinding system [2]. I am sure there were other issues that people faced but not being someone who actually fell in to the Simcity trap, I didn't follow it any more closely. In short, the whole 'just don't buy it' attitude does not work as it's a naive view that completely ignores several key parts of the puzzle. Importantly, those key parts of the puzzle all involve the power resting in EA's hands where the consumers have little leverage to affect change. EA already had their money and had disclaimers on not needing to offer refunds, so the approach of shut up and let the problem go away was fine for them. [1] https://help.ea.com/article/returns-and-cancellations https://help.ea.com/article/returns-and-cancellations [2] http://games.on.net/2013/03/maxis-to-address-simcity-pathfinding-complaints-as-more-bugs-are-found/ http://games.on.net/2013/03/maxis-to-address-simcity-pathfin...
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  In a sane market, people would learn not to preorder after something like that. Nut games isn't a sne market. Most people with experience on it move away.
ghshephard 13y ago
It's not just that the company released a crappy product - it's that they also "didn't tell the truth" about it. Their Always-On DRM was explained at varying times as either (A) Part of the compute process (untrue), or (B) Part of their MMO strategy - which given the almost complete lack of socialization in the game, makes no sense whatsoever. Should they be held accountable for their words/actions?

Tichy 13y ago

Maybe it just wasn't a very intetresting story. Gamers had to wait a couple of days for EA to fix their servers. Not very shocking at all.

ghshephard 13y ago
The issue was more the fact that they had Always On DRM built into the game, and didn't tell the full truth about what it was there for.
- Tichy 13y ago
  You mean like every game on Steam.
  - ghshephard 13y ago
    Has Steam ever claimed that their DRM (where it's used) is either for (A) Offline compute, or (B) MMO use? Personally, it's not so much the DRM that EA has infected their latest games with, or not even so much that it requires a constant internet connection (though, Sim City was one of the great play-alone games left) - but that they've been too cowardly too just come out and say, "Yes, we require you to be connected to the internet to play this game so that we can reduce piracy." Lying (or not telling the truth) about this obvious situation only makes them look bad.
  - verbatim 13y ago
    Not all games sold on Steam use DRM. See: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_games_on_steam/page1 http://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_games_on_st...
  - vor_ 13y ago
    Many games on Steam can be played in offline modes. Maxis claimed there was extensive server-side processing that required SimCity's online connectivity, but this was proven to be an exaggeration. In addition to a lack of local saving/loading, players have been losing their cities due to processing errors.

PakG1 13y ago

When I looked at the big hubbub about Yahoo's decision to end telecommuting, I couldn't help but think that Mayer was making the right decision by not commenting. She was hired to turn around a company in crisis, there were major problems, and she based her decision on data (seeing that many people who were supposed to work via VPN weren't even logging in according to their VPN records). It was clearly a unique decision for a unique situation and not a comment on telecommuting in general, despite what all the screamers were screaming. Judging from various comments from alleged insiders, it was a good decision because many of the telecommuters were just loafers. Fact is, who cares what the screamers were screaming? Would people boycott Yahoo's products because they ended telecommuting? This so cannot be compared to buying products made in sweatshops, which many people clearly did for years anyway (and still do). Would employees stop wanting to work at Yahoo? Apparently, job applications are way up, including what industry considers top tier candidates. When you make the right decision, sometimes the best option is to stay quiet and let the truth come out naturally. Of course, OP is more about the strategy in general, not whether or not the truth comes out naturally (in fact, in OP, they cared not for truth). I'm just saying I felt throughout the whole Yahoo telecommuting thing, Mayer did the right thing. Screw the screamers. They had no idea what they were talking about and wouldn't affect Yahoo in any way anyway.

venomsnake 13y ago
Nothing boosts the morale of a company in crisis than having a boss that rules with decrees instead of leading.
- PakG1 13y ago
  I'd love to hear a confirmed insider's view. Because I've ONLY heard good buzz about what they've been up to. Everything has been anonymous sources only (albeit many from journalists who promised anonymity), but I've yet to see any anonymous upset sources. It really seems like Yahoo's got swagger back. So I'd love to hear a confirmed insider's view.

ChrisNorstrom 13y ago

That's not "silence", that's the power of the "2 week give-a-damn limit". In today's society we're overwhelmed with constantly breaking news from all over the world. People tend to forget about things after about 2 weeks. There's just so many new things to care about that it's impossible to not move on from old news. Especially when it's just about a game. I'm sure gamers will keep the Sim City fiasco in the back of their minds and pirate later games published by EA but for now, we're really just tired of hearing about old news. Same thing happened with the whole "WarZ" fiasco. That team had false advertising on Steam, a glitched game released, artwork from the walking dead was stolen, bug reporters banned from the forums and censored. It was a lot worse than SimCity, yet 2 weeks later we just stopped caring. It's a shitty game, moving on, lets focus on something more important, like plastic in our oceans.

Goronmon 13y ago
There's just so many new things to care about that it's impossible to not move on from old news. Especially when it's just about a game. I'm sure gamers will keep the Sim City fiasco in the back of their minds and pirate later games published by EA but for now, we're really just tired of hearing about old news. Yeah, I think this about sums it up. When it comes down to it, all that happened is that a company made a bad game. Companies have been doing this for many years and will continue to do so for as long as the medium exists. If anything, this whole SimCity fiasco has made me less of a fan of RPS in general. It felt like half their site was dedicated to bad-mouthing the game and EA for the first week or so after release. And, of course, they need to throw out a piece like this after a while to generate page views and remind us how terribly angry we should be that such a tragedy could have been allowed to happen.
- onli 13y ago
  You misrepresent what happened severely. It isn't the case that this is simply about a bad game. This is about a game which didn't work for the people buying it. Which got great previews and reviews(!) before the issues with their servers arised. And which wasn't even a good game, because it was fundamentally flawed, which at the beginning remained undiscovered. Furthermore, this is not even about the game at all. It is about the crisis management of EA/Maxis, who simply lied (I doesn't care whether she lied or not, in effect it was a lie) when claiming that the Always-On-DRM, which prevented people from playing the game, was necessary to run the game at all because of server-side calculations. I think RPS is right to make a story out of this fact. Companies who get away lying their customers and the press should feel consequences of this. All too often, and in EAs case this seems to me especially true, companies who behave unethical create a growing mass of disgruntled players not respecting, and not buying from, that company anymore, which the company can ignore for quite a while when focusing only on quarterly results (and given the arrival of new players all the time), until the negative image becomes so overwhelming that their customer-base collapses.

sjtgraham 13y ago

This reminds me of the Instagram TOS fiasco. Instagram essentially was burned very badly by doing the right thing, i.e. by being extraordinarily forthright about changing their terms. Usually TOS provide the company the ability to change their terms without any notice whatsoever; we are somewhat unreasonably expected to regularly check back ourselves and try to find changes. Instagram tried to do right by their users by clearly communicating upcoming and significant changes that would affect their users, and the Internet collectively and unilaterally sh*t the bed. I remember thinking they were crazy for doing that, because it was obvious exactly how it would play out. Sometimes doing the right thing is the wrong thing. Unfortunately sometimes silence is golden.

acdha 13y ago
Instagram was burned for telling a story about their ToS which didn't match what they wanted to claim and then tried a classic non-apology apology rather than admitting overreach. If the new ToS had only claimed what they said they wanted this never would have blown up.

Aqueous 13y ago

Why did the SimCity story go away? Because the story isn't that important

macspoofing 13y ago

Or the story didn't have that much mileage to be begin with. After all, it's just a game, in a sea of other games.

bentcorner 13y ago

I don't think it really went away, at least for the fans at http://www.reddit.com/r/simcity http://www.reddit.com/r/simcity. It's like a constant steady flow of hate on there, such that I actually feel bad for Maxis after reading a few posts.

crazy1van 13y ago

I think the power of silence depends on the severity of the crisis. If your product is physically harming people or cost someone a lot of money, the controversy probably isn't going away after a few weeks of silence. People will not forget about a loved one being seriously physically or financially harmed. However, if the issue is a buggy piece of software that costs $60, that is going to be quickly forgotten. People don't have the energy to stay upset about something that in the grand scheme of things is so minor. If this is still registering on your personal radar a month later as a serious problem, consider yourself lucky.

executive 13y ago

The Power Of Silence: Why The Linode Story Went Away

tomphoolery 13y ago

I would be interested to know about "why" this whole debacle happened, but much later after I actually get to play the game. I love SimCity, loved almost every single version that Maxis has released, but this latest offering got me scared. So from others out there who play the game...is it even usable at this point?

tempaccount9473 13y ago
Usually I'd say pirate it, put 10 hours into it, and buy it to support the authors if you like it. But right now, you can't play the new Simcity without shovelling dollars into EA's pocket, and reward them for producing a fundementally broken game. You just have to decide for yourself which is more important to you. Providing feedback to bad corporate behavior by refusing to give EA your money, or your curiosity to play (and ultimately be disappointed by) a shitty sim with all depth and complexity removed in favor of "social" interaction and microtransactions (buy packs of 2 buildings for $5, i.e. http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-German-City-Online-Game/dp/B00BLS4H22 http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-German-City-Online-Game/dp/B00...). However, if you care about the future of games, please don't give EA money.

andrewljohnson 13y ago

When I heard all the negative press around SimCity, I became nostalgic for my childhood, and bought SimCity for iPod. I've really enjoyed playing it twice. Even though the controls are different, I picked up the knack right away.

jdechko 13y ago

Unfortunately, EA holds a position where they can ignore the complaints of fans. Fans of Sim City, Diablo, etc are the minority of their customers and they can treat us however they want to. Let's face it, Madden '13 and NCAA '13 will sell way more copies than Sim City has. Why should EA give a crap about a few stories on the internet?

diminoten 13y ago

This is also true for getting attacked personally on the Internet. If you're getting hit hard by say, 4chan, because they think you did something terrible or whatever, completely ignoring the personal attacks goes a long way towards stopping them.

deleted 13y ago

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danalmeida 13y ago

It may have made the story go away, but I personally never purchased SimCity because of it. Several times I considered buying it to pass some time then remembered the horrible press and never followed through. It certainly stuck around, its just in everyone's head now.

rdl 13y ago

Mostly I just stopped caring because I already knew EA was horrible, Origin sucks and people only use it when forced by EA, and SimCity is a crappy game (even independent of the DRM issues). Bioshock: Infinite came out and was good. Other than that, I just sit and wait for Civ V's next expansion, GTA:V, etc.

ekianjo 13y ago

It went away because people don't talk about new games after they are released for a couple of weeks. They whine and then most of them move on and look at other upcoming games.