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EA is supposed to be pretty happy with its SimCity BuildIt as it is a new way of generating lots of revenue through micro-transactions and makes the balance sheets look better. Meanwhile, players are pretty happy with Paradox's real passion about how to build a better city simulation game. For what it is worth, it is a win-win-win for EA, players, and Paradox Interactive.

The original Maxis team are the losers here. They worked 4 years to make something they thought would drive the genre forward but were sabotaged by executives who forced them to add DRM which destroyed the franchise when the servers exploded on release day. Then all their assets were transferred to another team who made the mobile version.

The gameplay imitations were far more severe than the DRM and online stuff. A clean release may not have generated such a brutal backlash, but it wouldn't have resulted in a genuine SimCity successor either.

Especially recently, Paradox has a streak of publishing overpriced, unfinished, even broken games. I'd wager that the success of Cities Skylines lies more with the developer than the publisher, and hope hope hope that PDX stayed away as much as possible from CS2s development.

"EA" didn't have the concept down, Maxis did. They bought out something and ruined it, par for the course for acquisitions.

Isn't it great when founders get a pay day but does that kind of thing really benefit everybody else? Just in general it doesn't seem that allowing most mergers is a particularly good thing for the American public, benefiting mostly just very large corporations who get to offload risk on to startups and their investors and reward only a lucky few (though skill is important, who succeeds and gets a good exit has a lot to do with luck)

Perhaps a more optimistic view is that the acquisition represented a one-way transfer of wealth from EA to the founders and shareholders of Maxis, who to their credit did bring good things into this world. It’s not clear to me that we would be better off if Maxis had never been acquired.

Simcity 2013 was the first time i asked for a game to be refunded. After that was rejected it became the first time and maybe only time i've used a credit card charge back.

I know "boycotts" don't work in the gaming industry but i can honestly say i haven't bought an EA product since.

That has been slightly easier by them only churning out yearly sporting games filled with micro transactions mind.

It’s amazing just how few EA games I have purchased in the last 10 years!

Wonder why a "The Sims" competitor hasn't appeared yet, would the lack of branding and general "charm" of The Sims(like Simlish) be a dealbreaker?

Paralives is the big one that's in development and crowdfunded.

They pull in >$40k/mo in Patreon funding, and have a team of >10.

Website: https://www.paralives.com/ Their Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/alexmasse

Unaffiliated, just a massive Sims fan :)

They actually announced one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNhV-Gnjdy8

Interesting, seems Paradox is becoming the new Maxis, or maybe it's Colossal Order (developer of Cities: Skylines) who is also the developer of this "Life by You"?

I hope someone fully realizes the vision of Spore (which was overly ambitious when it came out)

And I don't mean in the way No Man's Sky did!

Life by You isn't by CO, it's by a Paradox subsidiary they set up in the US, headed by the old EP of Sims 2 and Sims 3.

I hope we someday get a spiritual successor to SimEarth or SimAnt

That was actually one of the announcements made! Seems to be a Sims clone, in the early stages of development. I'm honestly looking forwards to it, rather than spending 1,000$ on Sims 4 on Steam.

Their sims-like game is actually developed by Paradox, so it's guaranteed there will be endless paid DLCs.

sims style DLCs are just a proxy subscription revenue model. As long as people are engaged consumers you can keep developing. If they don’t care about a particular DLC they don’t have to buy it. Sims 4 now has like 8 years of developer labor in it, if you were to install all the content. The original $30 (after retail cut) a user paid in 2015 wouldn’t have sustained that work.

Having to actually pay a subscription is actually much friendlier to players who want to get into the game a couple of years after it was first released. Of course the DLC model is much more profitable overall

If you're getting into a game years later then you probably don’t want all the content at once. Buy the base game with none of the DLC and play that for a while. Then decide which DLC will best enhance your current game; for example you might decide you want an amazing airport in your current city, so you get the Airports DLC. Or you might prefer a large University campus, so you get that one instead. Spread the content out over a year or two so that you are sure to get your money’s worth. Or just ignore the DLC and download mods and assets from the Steam workshop; you could spend a lifetime doing that and never catch up.

> probably don’t want all the content at once

If we’re talking about games developed by Parodox itself I really can’t imagine something like this. Core mechanics in most grand strategy games have usually been changed to a significant degree and while they are technically playable without DLCs the changes were most often made to better integrate the new content. Which overall left the base game in a largely crippled state.

Skylines is a lot better in this regard than something like Stellaris though.

I found https://store.steampowered.com/app/1538960/Crusader_Kings_II... to be an extremely good deal especially because I never tend to play these games continuously for significant periods of time. Obviously they are not offering this for newer games since it would usually lead to people spending 10s of dollars instead of 100s for the same amount of content .

On one hand, that’s absolutely true. On the other hand Paradox does a good job in maintaining the base game and constantly supplying it with free new features with every expansion.

PDX has been burned before by releasing DLC features that implicitly depend on other DLC features, and having to release patches that either unblock or kludge around it. The policy of “new mechanics are free, special abilities are paid” seems to me like a hard-learned lesson on maintaining configurations.

I am extremely optimistic looking at the CK3 DLCs though - they're closer to the early CK2 expansions that massively rehaul large portions of the game mechanics. I'm not certain if they're fully committed to that direction but it certainly feels better to look at those sorts of expansions than, say, HoI4 or some of the EU4 expansions which are generally just regional flavor packs.

I think they're not enamored of their reputation for crap shoveling and are making a concerted effort to deliver more value with their overhauls and that's why I've never really viewed them the same as skin-pushers like Roblox, CS:GO, The Sims or Fortnite.

Life By You seems to be that, which was also announced.

Another one is called Paralives: https://www.polygon.com/23433566/sims-5-project-rene-paraliv...

Actually, I want a Sims-like game with a real language instead of Simlish. It would be a great way to learn a language when immersion isn't possible.

I guess one reason they did this was because there would be a limited number of phrases and it would get repetitive quickly. LLMs could work around that today.

The brand is too strong with The Sims. It has multiple generations of fans who started with the original and are still playing the latest game.

As a long time fan I'm completely open to alternative takes on the life sim idea.

Turns out, building good _anything_ is profitable.

It's definitely not! Many good things cost more to build than people are willing to pay for them.

Yeah, lots of good things aren't profitable (at least to the ones making them). Xerox PARC comes to mind, Xerox didn't want to capitalize on those good things that were made there and thus Gates and Jobs did instead.

Xerox wanted to capitalize, but their business model, target customer and price point was not as innovative as the technology they had to offer.

The Dreamcast was considered by many gamers the best console of its time, great hardware, affordable price, great games, developer friendly. And yet, it was a commercial failure and it ended the Sega consoles.

Generally, for big profit, you need to build something good, but the reverse is not true. And you can still make small profit with crap.

But building user-hostile crap _anything_ is way more profitable

Well, no, not really - the example of Simcity 2013 vs Cities: Skylines given above is a great example where the user-hostile crap was much less profitable than what EA could have gotten based on their brand if they would have just made a straightforward remake similar to Cities: Skylines.

There's brand destroying short term strategies, and strategies that optimize for longevity.

> It just goes to show that

unlikely stuff does happen but not as much as likely stuff. Generalising from anecdotes and cherry picking data remains ill advised.

I posted this earlier [1] but it’s an interesting little twist to this story…

While EA was busy destroying the SimCity brand with unadulterated capitalist greed, Cities: Skylines was created with public funding from the Finnish government.

No VCs wanted to invest in such a niche company. They were only able to get off the ground thanks to money from Finland’s public startup funding and arts grants.

Capitalism on its own isn’t always enough to ensure that successful products get built. Sometimes it takes public funding to salvage a good idea that capitalism managed to burn down.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047255

A single example of government funding an indie developer of a niche title proves that the entire industry up until this point has been going about it wrong?

Government bureaucracy and inefficient spending never burned down good ideas? Never wasted untold billions on failed projects? When it comes to innovative ideas and forward thinking, people turn to short sighted bureaucracy and public funding.

The post you are responding to isn't claiming that

> the entire industry up until this point has been going about it wrong?

but it sometimes goes about it wrong.

> Capitalism on its own isn’t __always enough__ to ensure that successful products get built.

You are building up a strawman and attacking it with very hostile language. I would also disagree with your assumption that governments are inefficient, as there are good examples of efficient governments. Governments can get it right too, and the parent comment certainly isn't suggesting that governments are always right.

Every criticism you have levied: "burn[ing] down good ideas", "wasted untold billions on failed projects", "short sighted"-ness also have examples in the private sector and even with public companies.

Yes it does say exactly that.

EA is not an isolated company afflicted with capitalism. When you say a companies failures are due to capitalist greed, that means something. You are blaming the fundamental economic principles that the majority of publishers (and western businesses) operate on. Words like greed imply there is an inherent evil or 'sin' in capitalism that corrupts, and EA has somehow become its victim. In steps our hero the government with its keen eye for missed opportunities to save the day.

There is absolutely no assumption's about the inefficiency of bureaucracy and government.

That’s a completely incorrect interpretation of what I wrote.

EA destroyed a valuable brand by managerial greed. That’s a fact. Another company got funded by public means when capitalist institutions didn’t want to give them the time of day, and is now a successful business. That’s another fact.

I didn’t say anything about an inherent evil or sin. If you believe capitalism always executes perfectly and is beyond criticism, that’s your ideological position. You may be projecting this expectation of ideology onto others.

You have no proof the brand was destroyed by managerial greed. You also never said managerial greed, you said capitalist greed.. big difference.

You mention capitalisms failures and destruction of ideas while public funding saved the day. Pointing out that a single government grant does not make a game industry or save ideas destroyed by capitalism is not projecting ideology.

Did you read the story of SimCity 2013 linked here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041202

It seems pretty clear that this game was destroyed by EA management's poor decisions. They forced the game to require an active online connection primarily as an anti-piracy move, but then underfunded the development of the server-side functionality, so the servers were down for most buyers. For strategic reasons, they wanted to tie SimCity into EA's Origin game distribution platform, but this was just a hindrance to players.

Why did management make these decisions? To maximize shareholder value and increase their quarterly profits. EA as a company is a good example of the kind of short-term thinking that capitalism can encourage.

It's good to have a counterbalance. It can come in many forms. Tax-funded public instruments are one, but another important source of funding that's not distributed by capitalist principles are the various private foundations. And most of those were of course founded on wealth created by capitalism. So I'm not at all opposed to private wealth and market-driven resource allocation — I just don't think it should be the only way, or some kind of received truth that's above criticism.

A company attempting to prevent the theft of their product on a platform rampant with piracy is capitalist greed? Improving their share value by stopping the theft of their product is capitalist greed? How about they incompetently implemented anti-piracy measures and paid for it with consumer backlash?

PC gamers want to run games on a platform open to piracy, and call it greed when companies try to stop the theft of their own work.

...And where is the government in all this by the way? Anti-piracy laws seem to be grossly ineffective as it is so widespread. Companies have to protect their own work as government sits by idle.

This is somewhat out of context. Colosal Order developed two niche games before C:S; a transport simulator series called Cities in Motion. They received government funding before the first game was released. Many European countries have grants, tax cuts or loans for new businesses, so it's not anything unusual.

CiM 2 is a really good game, and very beautiful (which I guess is how they got the idea to build C:S). The focus is on transportation, and it does a much better job of simulating it than C:S (no despawning for starts). It has a few bugs and performance issues which I guess will never be fixed now, but worth playing if you like games that are a bit more constrained.

https://youtu.be/Bkwbajm7nG8

> “…it's not anything unusual.”

I would argue it’s actually unusual on HN to hear such an origin story for a successful business. Everybody has heard a hundred versions of the VC-funded twenty-something boy genius and also the bootstrapped hustler… But the story where your seed funding comes from government grants in a small European country doesn’t align with that kind of hero founder narratives.

Personally I got started in the software business with a Finnish government loan too, and I’m grateful for it. So I wanted to highlight that this actually happens and leads to products that people want.

I liked Cities in Motion. But like many other games like it, the joy dies when the UI can't keep up with the growing complexity as I build. Things that were easy in the beginning become a chore later on. That's when I give up and move on.

Finn here and i know the game and company and by no means Im not downplaying what you said but; In general - there are quite a few possibilities to apply for grants and similar monetary benefits from the goverment, municipalities and few ngo's here. And as a finn - I would find it actually miraculous that company such as Colossal Order would have never ever benefited from public funding.

Interesting! I suppose they recouped their investment via taxes.

How are we defining capitalism here? Because, you know, people are still getting paid for the work they are doing.

Getting paid for work is not the core underlying proposition of capitalism.

voluntary exchange and wage labor are... I am not seeing a contradiction here

> He's made over $300 million in revenue so far and might be the first solo game dev (or even regular software dev) to hit $1 billion in the course of the game's existence.

So you use revenue as a measuremeant of success, which is very reasonable.

> (hint: they don't want always-online DRM-filled games that nickle and dime you with microtransactions (well, most people anyway, there are always gacha/gambling-type whale gamers))

Then you said this. You know in terms of revenue, microtransaction is the most successful model, right? Mobile gaming is now bigger than PC gaming + console gaming. And they're basically all microtransactions. $300 million sounds a lot but it's just 2~3 months of Genshin. If revenue is a sign of what players "want", then the only logical conclusion is a lot people "want" microtransactions, they just don't admit it like people want BigMac but say they want to eat healthy.

I think it's a strong no-true-scotsman fallacy right here. You believe players don't want microtransactions, because you don't think those casual players who play Candy Crush, Clash of Clans or Genshin are "true players".

So apparently people _want_ to smoke tobacco.

My issue with your comment that I have attempted to frame in that pithy one-liner is that microtransactions are often sold through a manipulative sales window, in some cases games are designed around them to make the micro-transactions more appealing (e.g. games that throttle your progress unless you spend).

In addition, using revenue as a measure of popularity with micro-transactions is problematic because they are designed to effectively segment the market. This means they're not necessarily a solid indicator of what an average/median user might want because sometimes much of that revenue is a product of relatively few users (aka "whales").

I disagree. Target audience is not the same. Stardew Valley and Cities Skyline do not compete with Clash of Clans.

Making something unique can make more revenue than replicating other successful model with hight competition.

The only thing that was bypassed was forced disconnect after losing internet. You still could not save or trade between regions while offline. Server emulator appeared 4 months after release. Official offline mode was released a year after release.

Even if you got past the always online aspects, it just felt like a huge step down from Sim City 4. Too many opaque things going on, too much thrown at you, too high concept, didn't feel like building a model train set anymore.

> He's made over $300 million in revenue so far and might be the first solo game dev (or even regular software dev) to hit $1 billion in the course of the game's existence.

That would be Notch, who made Minecraft

As of May last year Stardew Valley sold over 20 mil copies, so 300 mil sounds about right. As staggerring as it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardew_Valley#Sales

Was Notch a solo dev when he sold to Microsoft? I think he had a team already. The Stardew Valley creator still doesn't have a full time team, I believe.