3 ms·

I'm guessing it was even more effective at preventing sales too

• flomo 13y ago
  It seems like there's a very loud minority concerned with the online issue. They created a shitstorm about Diablo 3 too, but the game still sold very well. The bigger issue seems to be that SimCity wasn't fun to play & didn't offer the scale of previous versions. Assume X number of people boycotted it, but Y people couldn't pirate it so they paid for it. The X people will be very loud, but the Y people won't.
• timje1 13y ago
  Considering some of the atrocious numbers I've heard thrown around regarding piracy on the PC, DRM that scares off some customers may be the result of some execs doing some hard number crunching. Something like: At current estimates, we sell 1m copies, and we'll get 5m pirates. If we put in really restrictive DRM, 100k of those original 1m sales will be put off, but we'll pick up one tenth of the pirates, putting us on 1.4m sales. Worth it! The problem with this calculation is that the pirates are often based in 2nd world countries that don't have a culture of paying for media (e.g. Russia) so preventing piracy won't boost sales from these countries. But have you folks ever tried to convince anyone with money on the line that piracy numbers != lost sales?