Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues | Hacker News Reader

Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

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708 pointsmrcharles434 comments

This could be a very big moment. EA is selling a completely broken product - and I mean that from the perspective of the average consumer, not the nerd who thinks all DRM is broken - and they're doing it for absolutely no reason. If this lasts long enough and gets enough press, it could actually be a turning point against DRM like this.

That would be so wonderful.

Oh, there's a reason. Like Diablo III, the point is that it's effectively impossible to crack. With enough processing offloaded to the server, would-be pirates need to write something that's almost a whole new game.

This is the future that big videogame companies are rushing to embrace, one where customers do not and cannot own games, merely rent them for an uncertain period. Indies and smaller studios with Kickstarter funding are going to continue eating a bigger part of their lunch.

The irony is that it is not only impossible to crack, it is now impossible to play as well. Unplayable games are impossible to crack, but this does not make them any less absurd. DRM has come to its logical and absurd conclusion, it seems.

It worked out the same way with music. For a short time the labels were experimenting with selling CDs that weren't actually audio CDs, but had been damaged in various ways to make them unplayable on a computer. The result of that experiment speaks for itself. Hopefully it will play out the same way here.

The result is that we are increasingly switching to renting our music via services like Rdio and Spotify.

And I can't say that this trend is all bad. I know what I pay for (temporary access), and I'm OK with that.

Apple seems to still be doing alright selling digital music, and they voluntarily stopped using DRM.

Apple didn't voluntarily stop using DRM; they convinced the labels to stop requiring it. Piracy isn't Apple's concern, but the user experience is.

This is in service of saying that DRM isn't in the user's best interest and even big companies that care about user experience don't like DRM. Apple didn't ship DRM on its OSes when they were DVD based either. Yes they probably lost some sales due to piracy, but not having to deal with serial numbers is big for users.

No, Amazon stopped using DRM to have a competitive advantage versus Apple, the music companies went along because it gave them a real competitor to iTunes, and eventually Apple managed to renegotiate their contracts so they could also remove the DRM.

Juicy, juicy revisionist history!

>they convinced the labels to stop requiring it.

Are you sure it wasn't the other way around? People were building huge libraries of music that only worked on Apple products (iPods and iTunes) around the time the labels allowed Amazon to start selling DRM-free MP3s. Apple would have gained an enormous amount of leverage if the labels had allowed that to continue: "Oh, you won't accept our terms? Well, then your product won't be playable on 90% [0] of portable music devices [1] and won't be available in the largest online music store (and your competitors' will be)! I hope not all your artists have left by next fiscal quarter." For all he talked amount it, I'm not convinced that Steve Jobs ever wanted to see the iTunes Music Store go DRM-free.

The market penetration of iPods meant that only path forward for the labels was one that allowed people to listen to music on their iPods. The only way to do that was selling DRM-free MP3s or protected AAC files. As a bonus, DRM-free MP3s worked on all the cheap flash-based players (which always had greater deployment than any of the DRM-compatible players from Sony and Microsoft).

[0] A number generated by my PRNG (posterior random number generator). But the iPod Classic really does have an absurd share of the >64GB market (probably declining now that you can get tablets and phones with 128GB of flash). [1] Don't forget that Apple has only ever supported their own DRM. Protected AAC files play on Apple devices and only Apple devices. Apple devices support only protected AAC and DRM-free formats.

>>they convinced the labels to stop requiring it. > >Are you sure it wasn't the other way around?

You must have missed this. A Steve Jobs classic. Music industry execs have confirmed Apple was behind the move away from DRM.

http://www.apple.com/uk/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

I meant no 'gameplay' reason - I know that they have a financial reason to do this, or that they think they do, at least. If they lose enough sales and get enough hate, that removes even the financial reason that they thought they had for doing this. So perhaps, hopefully, maybe, they'll choose to stop doing it.

>Like Diablo III, the point is that it's effectively impossible to crack. With enough processing offloaded to the server, would-be pirates need to write something that's almost a whole new game.

I agree that this is a strong deterrent but given how even MMORPG servers have been reversed engineered [1] it's not impossible. If SimCity proves as enduring and as desirable as WoW we may well see it coupled with a LinCity-NG-derived [2] backend or similar.

Edit: That said, a powerful stimulus for the development of MMO server emulators was that players dissatisfied with the official servers' community simple couldn't run their own server how they'd like it for whom they like. I assume that the new SimCity is designed to be a far less community-oriented experience and people in control of the neighboring cities are largely replaceable from a player's perspective.

[1] See http://www.runuo.com/, http://www.galaxiesreborn.com/, https://launchpad.net/aurora-runescape-server-emulator, http://arcemu.org/, etc. Note how many of those are community FOSS projects, even though running them with an official client is almost always a ToS violation.

[2] http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I've got to point out that my previous remark about a LinCity-NG back end was made half-jokingly and now that I've noticed that's not really obvious it's too late to go back and edit the comment. The difference between how your city is represented in SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4, on which LinCity-NG is based, and the new SimCity is quite profound and I thought I'd explain it further.

First, the new layout engine finally allows you to construct roads at arbitrary angles and not just along the axes. This makes it fundamentally incompatible with the old grid-based map format used in SimCity since version one with few alternations [1]. Then there's the agent model of economics [2], a change from previous games' broad statistical model, that seems to be deeply integrated with the game's visualization.

[1] The biggest change was likely the introduction of varying terrain height in SimCity 2000.

[2] The developers give a brief explanation in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz-UGPRilUE. Looks like they've done some pretty interesting things with it.

It's not the engine that needs to be reverse engineered. It's the balance and legitimacy. If you offload all the RNG and cause equipment to be controlled by a central entity, then it becomes both opaque and a single-point-of-failure. People know EVERYTHING about Diablo 2 drops, because you have the machine logic right there. Not true about, say, World of Warcraft, where people know a lot of macro statistics about drop rates and so on through crowd-sourced data gathering, but they don't know a lot of things, like boss pathing rules and event scripting.

Running a private server for a MMO has a ton of fundamental barriers. 1) Players don't get timely balance updates. 2) Players have no confidence that admins won't hack/give away items/cause crazy events etc. (Central point of authority = central point of corruption. Even if there don't happen to be any game-breakingly generous admins on a server, you can't signal that reliably to potential players.) 3) Servers may disappear. Since info is central, but private servers may fold under takedown notices, owners running out of money, technical problems, lack of other players, or anything else, players can't have trust that their time spent will have lasting rewards. Credibility is almost impossible to build.

Basically, by making games reliant on a central authority, you force the element of trust and credibility into the picture. Usually the only server with any credibility is the one run by the game company itself, since ideally you can trust that their actions will be in the best long-term interests of their game and audience. (EA in particular lost that trust a long time ago, I haven't bought a game of theirs in a LONG time. But Valve, or Blizzard, and even Ubisoft to a lesser extent still have that credibility.)

How much of D3's processing is done offloaded? Are there any articles online that I could read about this?

Originally they told us quite a bit of logic was done on their servers. But then they announced that Diablo 3 would be playable offline on the PlayStation 4. Now I don't know what to believe. Could it be it was all just talk to stop us from trying?

The servers are almost certainly running from the same source base as the client. Swapping out who-does-what, compared to a console port, is trivial.

Or that the PS4 version is the first variant that has enough functionality built in for it to be playable offline.

they're probably just running the server code on the ps4 alongside the client. it's easier to secure there

No, item drops are actually done on a server, to guarantee fair drops for everyone(you can sell them for real money, so you would rather make sure nobody just adds an item worth $$$ to their inventory). PS4 won't be connected to the Auction House, so most likely it will include just its own, internal version of the server that will generate item drops.

Map generation, some enemy AI, and most frustratingly: combat action outcomes.

My story was the same as numerous other players: started playing hardcore, died not because of a mistake, but because of lag (internet lagged for a few seconds, that was enough for monsters to kill me, when internet came back moments later I was told I died).

At that moment I decided not give ANY more money to Blizzard, and closed my WoW membership.

"With enough processing offloaded to the server, would-be pirates need to write something that's almost a whole new game."

Sure, and with sufficient bandwidth and computational power you could actually hide all the game logic using a secure computation protocol. Only a complete idiot would do that for something as performance-intensive as a video game.

The problem here is that we do not have reliable or fast Internet connections. As soon as your connection has a burp, or you get hit with some bufferbloat, or half your neighborhood starts streaming the Super Bowl in 1080p, your game starts to play worse. What EA failed to realize here is that the best way to make money in games is to offer a superior online gaming platform, not to try to sell individual games as products. Microsoft figured that out with XBox Live a long time ago.

Then when company goes belly up games die. Like Hellgate London multiplayer.

>effectively impossible to crack.

hack into their servers, steal binaries of game server, modify client to work with local server.

The thinking goes - without DRM, some large number, X % of the games are just copied instead of purchased.

With DRM, close to 0% of the the games are copied, but some large number Y % of the games are no longer purchased because people either are (A) Philisophically opposed to DRM, (B) Want to be able to play the game offline, or now, (C) Can't play the game because the DRM breaks it.

The balancing act, here, is how many of those X% can be converted into purchases, and how many of those Y% valid purchases are lost.

EA may have tipped the balance here through poor execution and resulted in fewer games being sold, but, I don't work in the game industry - so I don't know how high X normally gets. (50%? 75%? 90%? 95%? I'm sure it's a pretty disheartening number)

For many of the X%, purchasing was not a consideration; what's more useful to consider is how many people that were paying customers in the past STOP paying, given that they've demonstrated their willingness to pay.

Also a consideration: 866 reviews and a "1-Star" average.

A lot of games are copied, but it's a fallacy to assume that pirating a game means you won't buy it, or that attempting to pirate a game and being prevented (by DRM or some other means) means you'll buy it instead.

In college I pirated games quite a bit. I never bought one, nor would I have.

Oh, I totally appreciate that - and, those people who would never have purchased the game in the first place, but copy it, provide some good word of mouth advertising for the game.

The thing is though, if the number gets high enough, let's say 95% of people just copy the game (not unlikely in the age of torrents) and only 5% purchase it - might not be enough to fund a AAA game, whose budgets now run in the 100s of millions of dollars, and, at $70/pop, need about 6-10 million purchases to make up for the flops that will also occur.

The real problem, is that if it's _really_ easy to copy, and the company puts in no attempts to prevent this, then a lot of the people who would have purchased the game, don't bother and just download off the torrents.

Tough balancing act. I don't know what the answer is.

I agree.

I do think the effect of piracy on a company's bottom line is overstated in just about every case. It's easy for us an the HN community (generally pretty intelligent and technically inclined) to forget that downloading a torrent isn't the simplest thing in the world, particularly the lengths you need to go to in order to get some pirated games to even function properly.

Torrents have gotten pretty amazingly simple and are now mainstream . My 65 year old mother figured out how to torrent a TV show (that wasn't available in Canada - she tried to buy it first, but they wouldn't sell it to her) in about 30 minutes, including the time required to download and install µTorrent. I would guess that 90%+ of the computer using population is now comfortable torrenting files.

Agreed with you on the hassle of running a pirated game, and, honestly - I'm unwilling to run some random .app/.exe on my system. Hell, I'm not even comfortable opening .pdfs anymore.

Guess that just goes to show you how long it's been since I've downloaded a torrent :)

Torrenting video games is still a bit more involved than torrenting a tv show.

You have zips, rars, 7zs, archives split into parts. Some need you to mount a iso file, some you need to mount multiple iso files. You may need to run a sketchy exe to patch the game, or copy files from an iso into the installation folder, run other patches in the correct order, etc. etc.

It's incredibly simple to download a torrent. My non-technical parents have done it in the past, without asking me how to.

In fact, from your desktop, it takes less than seven steps total to download and watch a Full HD movie of your choosing from the pirate bay.

Downloading and watching a TV show means installing and using 2 applications (utorrent and vlc for example). Downloading and playing a game from a torrent means installing and using 4-5 applications (utorrent, winrar, daemon tools, the crack, the game its self).

This is why steam and GoG wins. Before I look for my old CDs or search on p-bay for that old game which I wouldn't mind killing a few hours on, I check to see if it is ~$5 on steam or GoG. The process is so simple and next time I feel like a trip down memory lane I know it'll still be there in my steam/GoG library waiting for me.

The answer was discovered long ago: online play. Starcraft had this interesting concept: you could enter a key to play in single-player mode, and even have some fun playing against the AI, but to play on Battle.net you needed a unique key. Online play is a whole different level of exciting from offline play, and Battle.net makes Blizzard a ton of money. Likewise with XBox Live for Microsoft.

That EA failed to realize that they could monetize an online Simcity regardless of whether or not people pay to play offline demonstrates a serious lapse of judgment.

How does Blizzard make money from Battle.net?

Only indirectly. Under 20% of Starcraft's sales occurred within a year of release, so I think it's fairly safe to say that the vast majority would not have happened if bnet did not exist.

Well, I understand why they did what they did. It joins a category of games like Diablo 3, where the basic value proposition for the purchaser is fundamentally single player, but the value proposition for the developer follows all the network-effect-leveraging growth-dependent online product tropes. Diablo 3 is especially starkly obvious: the auction house is where Blizzard makes its money post-sale, so they want people playing online. They think it will be better for players in the long run if they are involved in the social and online elements, and they might even be right, but they correctly surmise that unless they force people to be online, people will choose the easy route and play single player.

I don't particularly think they are wrong. For example, after a while, the ridiculous ease of obtaining hacked items ruined single-player for me -- it would be more fun I'm sure to have to work for everything, but I don't have the willpower or incentive to do that unless it's forced on me.

Look at Minecraft. There are multi-hundred player online servers that do great business by providing a persistent world where people have to work for things, making their money by giving diamonds and perks to donors. Not many people play single-player religiously. It's fun for a while, but the main demographic that plays offline is almost certainly the hopeless creatives. (And there's a lot more people who are into competitive/cooperative rat races than are endowed with both a self-motivating sense of design and a bunch of free time.)

That's true, but it's not what he was talking about. He wasn't talking about "one download, one lost sale" mentalities. He was talking about revenue loss in general. And if it's possible to pirate a game, you will lose some revenue from that. It might not mean every act of piracy is a lost sale, and it might not mean the game has a net revenue loss due to piracy. But there will be some revenue loss somewhere.

Seems like Valve is spot-on with that X%, and maybe even lowers it a little by offering such a great service and caring about their customers. That sounded fanboy-ish, but it's the truth.

If it isn't on GoG or Steam (or Humble Bundle) I just don't buy it. I don't have that much time for games and will just go without. Steam is an amazing service, I am surprised that movies and music have not followed suit.

While I have a number of complaints about the Steam client, the service itself is fantastic.

Your C point implies purchase.

It's safe to assume EA uses purchases as their success metric, as they are unlikely to complain you actually paid for the game.

See conversion rates from free vs paid. Lets use the average number of 3%. 100% is all users, which mean all who bought the game added with all who would have pirated the game, and 3% is the total amount of people who would potential spend money.

Out of those 3%, you need to remove A), people who do not pirate), people who do not compare stores and just buy from what is most convenient, and C), people who would buy if there was DRM preventing piracy.

We can now assign weight to those groups. Group B, is likely to be largest given human nature and sale numbers from places like steam. Group A would likely come second, and Group C would be smallest. Lets use the weights 3/6, 2/6, 1/6 proportions for each group. That makes Group C somewhere around 0.5% of the users which the DRM scheme might get to buy the game.

Is 0.5% additional conversion rate worth the costs of DRM scheme, additional support, and a tanked amazon review rating of 1 star?

So there was a big server meltdown during the Diablo 3 launch, is this the same thing? I'm not sure how long the Sim City servers have been down but is this just initial launch problems? I'm surprised Amazon has done this as they didn't do the same for D3. How long have logins been totall down for now?

Also I think it would be helpful for reviews like this on Amazon and Spore to restrict the reviews to only verified purchases. People submitting 1 star reviews because they require you to be online just because they don't like it shouldn't be allowed to submit a rating.

The short version is that the server performance for SC was so bad that EA took them down for maintenance. The maintenance message also had an error in it, something to the effect of "Servers will return at <string>"

I played Diablo 3 quite soon after launch and while there were "hiccups" (my character would occasionally jump around due to lag) I could connect fairly quickly to a server. From the reviews the Sim City servers seem to be overloaded much more than D3 servers were.

The always connected to the internet aspect was bad for D3 and it seems it is even worse for Sim City. If I remember correctly, Blizzard had legal problems in South Korea because of connectivity. My hopes is that incidents like this force companies to move away from the online only single player design.

I think that aside from the philosophical problems with DRM in general, the required internet connection aspect means that once EA shuts down the server the game could be lost forever. When making these games (good or bad) a team adds something to the cultural record of our time. Old movies may not be as good as modern movies in terms of technical execution, but they are interesting because they contain within them an aspect of a lost culture. Games should aspire to do the same.

I agree with you in principle but I will suggest that titles which are overly-burdened with bullshit DRM will tend to be less important to the cultural record. I think that's the case here.

I don't disagree with you :)

SimCity's problems were much like Diablo 3's character creation problems at launch.

With Diablo you had a hell of a time just getting a connection to a server - but once you were in you got to play (laggy though it may be).

With SimCity you'd bash your head against your computer connecting to a server, but even after you do that every step could possibly fail because it was doing something substantial to an internal database (presumably) that doesn't scale - creating a city, taking over a city, joining a region, etc etc.

See even once you're past the dreaded "wait 30 minutes for your turn", there's still no guarantee your game will even be functional.

IIRC with DIIIs error 37, it was just the authentication servers so once you actually got past them and into the game the game-play servers were mostly ok (albeit laggy)

With SC5 its the actual game play servers that seem to be full, and also fairly buggy (saved game corruption, unable to create regions/cities or join, losing hours of work)

EA have already launched a product like this: Battlefield 3. It was pretty unstable in the first weeks and the game required an internet connection and login to even play the game. Since it's a PC FPS that's not CoD, it didn't get too much press. I, for one, will not trust another game a DRM-laden game again due to BF3 and SimCity 2013 just reinforces that.

I've seen pirated copies of (single-player only) BF3. What about the DRM is so different between that and Sim City?

I believe BF3 used internet connectivity only for DRM which means it's easy to carve out. SimCity actually computes the game mechanics on their cloud servers.

It doesn't. The game can survive without a connection for 20 minutes. The only logic run on their servers is save/load.

Anything that happens at the region level requires the servers.

Imagine one as a gate keeper and one as a patrol. In one you need to get past the gate keeper. In the other you need to be constantly vigilant everywhere because the code is fully DRM integrated.

Games that utilize internet connectivity for DRM only can simply fake the internet connection.

On Steam, this is done by tricking the copy of the game that the .dlls and relevant Steam .exe are running and everything is in order. Comparatively trivial to do, and these games are cracked very quickly.

However, games like Simpsons Tapped Out, Sim City, etc. go a step further and prevent you from playing without an internet connection. This means that instead of just needing to fool the game initially and cruise from there, you can't just surgically remove the DRM. It's too integrated into the back-end code. The only solution is to fake a server. Much more difficult.

Battlefield 3 is a bad comparison because it's intrinsically a multiplayer franchise. No one complains that they need an internet connection to play World of Warcraft, because it's expected.

Additionally, BF3 had an offline single-player mode. SimCity could have an offline single-player mode, but elected not to.

That would probably be wonderful but it's not going to happen. They'll take a look at what went wrong "this time" and be convinced they will not make the same mistakes next time. Then they'll try again. Too their credit, that's the definition of good business and, chances are, it will work better next time.

Some companies are just better than others at getting it right the first time (or second, or third).

I just wish this hadn't happened with SimCity. I really liked that title.

Knowing some in charge, I can say only this: Karma.

I feel bad for the game devs who got to see their hard work turn into something they don't intend.

I suppose this is a great advertising technique for small firms, startups, indie shops, etc. "Don't want this[http://amazon-pulls-sim-city] to happen? Work for our small team. We won't destroy your work."

I know it's standard to say "you get a part in the decisionmaking process!" That's part of it. But a lot of people are willing to let go of the big decisions if they get to be a part of something great. But they have to trust that it will come out well in the end.

Isn't this just a technical error (bug) that is a game dev's (or infrastructure engineer's) responsibility? I understand the frustration at the DRM concept, but you can't blame this on the larger entity as a whole when it was likely just a bug in some code or a small oversight.

Things were clearly working when it was in beta.

You make a really good point. Rereading my comment, it's brusque.

I still think there's a point to be made about trust in a larger organization, but as someone who a) doesn't know precisely what the specific problem is and b) doesn't know whether I wouldn't have made the same mistakes, I'm going to acquiesce.

I don't know about this specific instance, but from what I recall from working in the video game industry, devs don't deal with copy protection; it's something that's done prior to mastering where they put your executable through SecuROM or whatever and it spits out a new binary that has copy protection/CD checks/online auth or whatever junk the publisher wants to add.

This isn't the case here. The game does significant processing on their servers, to make it useless as soon as they turn their servers off, which AFAIK they haven't promised to keep up any certain amount of time.

Thanks for the clarification; it's pretty awful of them to have them have this copy protection mechanism and fail to allocate enough server resources for people to be able to play the game they legitimately purchased.

It sounds as if some random MBAs said that they really need that server-side undefeatable copy protection, then balked at the price of actually purchasing enough resources for it and decided to skimp on that.

No, it actually doesn't sound like some random MBAs.Are you one of those guys that blame MBAs for everything?The truth is we don't know what actually happened there.We'll have to wait for EA's reply on this one.It will be hard for them to recover after a huge mistake/strategy like this.

>We'll have to wait for EA's reply on this one.

If EA's usual response to criticism means anything, we'll be waiting a loooooong time...

>It will be hard for them to recover after a huge mistake/strategy like this.

You're kidding, right? They'll just release Call of Modern Madden 5: Battlefield Part 2 and the fanboys will eat it up, horrid DRM and microtransactions and all.

If the reviews and reaction to the last Medal of Honor are anything to go by, people are finally getting tired of that old rehashed formula. The next CoD may not be as successful as the previous installments were.

It does. Do game developers implement DRM when not required to by the bean counters?

"fail" makes it sound accidental

I'd put good odds that server allocation was a very high level decision balancing the expected backlash

They knew Amazon rating / word of mouth is going to put a massive hit on the LaunchDay+1 sales anyways, so what do they care if it actually works once you've handed over your cash?

a) When it was in beta, there was presumably much less server load. b) The fact that a small bug in the unnecessary server/DRM part of the game could take the whole game down like this is precisely the point. You can certainly blame the whole entity for deciding to require a net connection and a server even for single-player use of the game.

but the beta had the same issues, they were never fixed before release.

Absolutely right, you could totally see this train wreck coming.

http://imgur.com/xddfMvh

The point is that its a highly failure prone requirement with dire consequences. Imagine if you were designing a car and the Business Analyst told you that this car needed a constant internet connection at all times or else the engine would immediately cease injecting gas.

While you could blame the engineers for all the cars that died in the middle of highways, it'd be far more realistic to blame the Business Analyst for demanding such an arduous and failure prone requirement.

Engineers can only make things work to a point and after that some real world limitations need to be taken into account.

No, its not that simple.

Isn't this just a technical error (bug) that is a game dev's (or infrastructure engineer's) responsibility?

Isn't mandating the constant involvement of otherwise unnecessary tech that is known to be error prone and unreliable just the result of a poorly thought out buisness requirement?

No, its not that simple either. Because they probably did think it out, knew they were choosing the riskier technical option and expect/expected failures to happen.

My read of the situation is that they expected the rest of the game to get a better reception overall and blunt the bad PR from the inevitable failures caused by the always-on/centralized aspects.

Also known as the Diablo III strategy.

Diablo III was (I think -- not like I've played Sim City yet) worse because the online AH was built into the gameplay Imagine if WoW's loot had been designed so that raid loot would NEED to be traded via a real money AH with Blizzard taking a cut.

Of course for all we know Sim City will turn out to have that kind if BS too.

WoW + RM:AH = Titan

that poor game's so predestined to be a blatant cash whore, almost makes you feel bad for it

I'm voting with my dollars in this case. I'm a huge fan of Starcraft and I've decided not to get heart of the swarm. The Internet requirements for Diablo 3 and StarCraft are totally excessive. I'm about to go on a flight now and I would have loved to play either one. But instead, Apple gets my time and money this evening.

In Sim City case, part of the simulation is run at their servers. Even while playing a private region, lost of aspects of the simulation are affected by the 'world' (other players). So, it´s not _just_ a matter of DRM: online is part of the game (unfortunately). The point is: did the developers decided to do it that way _because_ EA made online DRM mandatory for them, or they did think this way since t=0 ? We´ll probably never know.

Yep. There were probably tech guys who said you shouldn't do it, but the tech guys that said you can probably got the promotions.

It kills me a little inside to know this is probably 100% correct.

It's actually very unlikely. What is likely is that all the tech guys will be laid off because SimCity didn't meet financial expectations.

This isn't a bad thing. EA should fire all it's developers, designers, sales people, management, liquidate its assets and distribute the proceeds to its shareholders, and quietly go out of business.

Really, the tech guys that got laid off will almost certainly go to find better jobs. Almost by definition, since they won't be making games at EA anymore.

Doing a massive online game takes a broad skillset and different development patterns than single player.

I'd probably place money on the fact they failed the load testing. (Yes, I'm xEA and was involved in the last simcity load test)

It's not a technical bug, but it's a deliberately made flaw - and it illustrates what will happen when after a couple of years they'll turn the servers off (The current list http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0L266ui... shows even games of 2011 disabled already), leaving the game that you "bought" useless.

Digital Restrictions Management = Defective by Design.

isn't Steam also DRM and hugely successful and very popular with the gaming community?

Steam also presents a risk, but it's at least actively working to make it less bad for the consumer:

1) You can play most of games offline if you have a flaky connection; 2) They don't have a standard practice of turning off servers to 'obsolete' games, unlike EA. The Steam games are expected to work as long as Steam itself works; but SimCity most likely won't work much longer after the next SimCity is released, as we can see from EA current practices.

EA is also actively working on making things less bad by provisioning more hardware and disabling "non-critical" features.

DRM is DRM. People only get angry when things don't work, with the occasional philosophical argument thrown in to prove a point after the fact.

Steam gets less hate only because their servers have better uptime, but the hate towards EA comes in the form of a philosophical argument about how DRM is fundamentally broken.

Ultimately I think users are pragmatic; if DRM stays out of the way they won't care, and that's by-and-large how Steam is for most people. They also seem to focus on value-add items, such as being able to install (easily!) on multiple computers, operating systems, etc., whereas EA and other companies seem to provide more pain than pleasure. If a company appears to be trying to help people, they'll lovingly hand over their money. If a company seems to be only interested in their wallets, twitter and message boards will not be kind.

Yes. My issue is that the unkindness towards this particular company (EA) comes in the form of a philosophical argument about why DRM is fundamentally broken.

The main difference is that Steam's DRM, if it requires an online connection, only requires it in order to start the game up. Once you are in-game, you aren't booted from the game if you lose your connection while playing. That isn't the case when playing games like SimCity and Diablo 3.

Though, it SimCity's case it seems to be worse as I've heard people losing saves occasionally. I don't remember too many people losing characters when Diablo 3 launched.

I'm not sure you can call DRM "Defective by Design" then. It works for Valve and they are making a lot of money by stifling piracy with it.

The problem with EA then isn't DRM but badly implemented DRM.

On one side, valve's DRM is far less intrusive than EA's and on the other side valves efforts to curb piracy involves a lot more than just slapping DRM on. I remember a large post (interview?) where the gist was:

* Treat all markets equal and release the game at the same time. Not having access to a game that's released elsewhere is a huge driver of piracy. * Support your games, release follow-up content. * Actually make the DRM-Service a service: I can buy a game on steam and if there is a mac/windows/linux version, I can actually play all three of them.

It's all give and take. It's annoying that Steam games are DRM protected, but OTOH, I get added benefits. Just taking functionality from the user won't get you far.

People often buy slightly defective products when they're competitive in other features - that doesn't change the fact that any game would be a higher quality, more desireable product if the DRM was removed.

The "defective by design" refers to features unwanted by customer, but intentionally designed by manufacturer.

Examples in the physical world are specific short-lived parts in consumer appliances to reduce their longevity and increase sales - as it's better for manufacturer if a washing machine lasts 5 years but not 10; or new printers being sold with half-full cartridges to facilitate sales of replacements. Quite useful to the producer, but nonetheless despiceable.

That is not true of all Steam games. Some games that rely on Steamworks will fail when they lose connection. Others have no real DRM at all. The executables can be run completely independent of Steam.

Spend a year or more in a local without consistent internet access and Steam's solution is not nearly as rosy. Putting Steam in offline mode requires that your first make an internet connection to cache. Even then after a few days, the cache expires and you have to be able to connect again.

I don't feel bad at all. They know who they've chosen to work for.

>I suppose this is a great advertising technique for small firms, startups, indie shops

You mean like all those small valley startups creating Rails web apps that only work when the user has an internet connection? I don't see the difference.

This is not a web site, it's a game. It is marketed and sold as a game.

It isn't even being marketed/sold as an MMO. For the most part, people think this is a single player experience with some multiplayer interactions.

I haven't seen the retail packaging, but does it even state an internet connection is required? And if so, is it prominent?

EDIT: According to the shot on Amazon[1], it does at least state that a "persistent internet connection [is] required to play". Not excusing them by any means, but that's better than what I was expecting from the likes of EA.

[1]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/815mDnNUDhL._SL1121_.j...

So your argument is really that DRM is ok as long as the user knows about it in advance?

No, I didn't say that at all.

I simply said comparing this to a web app is not apples-to-apples.

I should at least be able to make an informed choice in the matter.

'web' apps are expected to work on the 'web'. It kind of goes without saying that it there is no network it can't make whatever calls it needs to in order to load data.

Games are not generally expected to require a network connection. If I take my laptop to the coffee shop without wireless I can still play Portal and Anno 2070.

Not so with the new SimCity.

Not to mention, there is an expectation that if you buy a game (especially on physical media) that you will be able to play it so long as your hardware supports it. I can still play Quake 3 for example.

With SimCity, if they ever shutter the servers or sunset the Online Service your game becomes nothing more than a pretty coaster.

> If I take my laptop to the coffee shop without wireless I can still play Portal and Anno 2070.

Unless you bought Portal on Steam and didn't sign in when you had an internet connection.

While that is a valid general criticism of Steam, they do provide an offline mode, which the new Sim City does not. Personally I prefer Steam to the previous alternative of having to leave the CD in the drive, or using a dodgy no-cd patch - but that's getting off topic.

The DRM strategy in Sim City is not the same as Steam, and cannot really be compared. EA are forcing unnecessary always-online features into what most people expect to be a single player game, preventing it from being played offline at all, in a thinly veiled attempt to prevent piracy and resale. That would be bad enough, but what makes it utterly unacceptable is that they haven't provided the infrastructure to support it in the short term, and clearly don't have the business model required to support it beyond the first few years.

Why anyone would knowingly support this business practice at all is beyond me, let alone for a game which has had such dubious pre-release reviews and is now essentially unplayable.

Mayyybe I'm misreading your argument since I've read it about 5 times and am not sure if you're serious, but web apps need the web to work by design, why would a single player game need the web to work?

> why would a single player game need the web to work

For the same reason Siri needs a connection to work: there's a lot of heavy processing going on, which your client device just couldn't handle even if it wanted to, that is being offloaded to a cluster somewhere instead. In Siri's case, it's linguistic analysis; in SimCity's case, it's inter-city traffic-flow, economy, and other expansive high-granularity world-simulation tasks.

...or, at least, that's what EA's engineering claimed at some point. To still be charitable to them, but to temper this with pragmatism a bit, I don't think there's really that much difficult processing going on; I imagine it was more that high-end gaming PCs could run everything client-side, but the low-to-medium-end PC market--from which Maxis pulls the lion's share of its sales volume--couldn't.

Shoving the processing server-side means everyone can get the effect of throwing a 3GHz Xeon at their world-simulation, and the total amount of processing required can be decreased dramatically by using player's real cities to neighbor other real cities for inter-city world-sim calculations, instead of having to simultaneously synthesize the behavior of 8+ AI cities to interact with each real one.

To put it another way, I imagine it would be very hard to market a game where the core feature ("new, more granular, more realistic simulation!") degrades into non-existence on the average PC, thus rendering an upgrade from the previous version moot.

No, you completely missed his point. His argument is that internet isn't immediately associated with games. So a web connection isn't implicit or explicit in playing a game.

Integral to a web app is the use of the web. It's even semantically connected. It's explicit.

But it's not even implicitly understood that a game need a web connection. It's not part of its integral operation. Why would it be?

TL;DR: Things on the internet obviously need a web connection. Things not directly related to the internet...shouldn't need one.

"I feel bad for the game devs who got to see their hard work turn into something they don't intend."

On the contrary, this is by far the most realistic simulation of working for government that's ever been created.

!! Sim City DRM is just part of a really deep ARG. Maybe they hired the ilovebees people?

I love how the anti-government mindset even blames greed based failures of private industry on the government.

People like narratives :)

Cool, when did that happen?

I love how the pro-government mindset sees even casual jokes at the expense of governments as "blaming the government".

I love how anti-government mindset even assumes those, who couldn't give a monkey's, are pro-government.

I trust you'll notice that my unreasonable labeling of Steko as "pro-government" for what he said mirrors the equally unreasonable labeling of Alex3917 as "anti-government" for what he said.

Anti-government joke: something stupid or bad happened. That's just like the government! Har har har har

That reminds me; did you here the one about women? Terrible drivers amirite?

I didn't say it was a good joke...

Greed in government and greed in private industry are interchangeable. There isn't some magic fence between the two groups.

EA has a reputation for being more akin to a sweatshop than a place where passionate people work on things they love, and it's been that way for many years now.

I do feel bad for anyone who works in that type of environment, but I don't think many (if any) of their employees are under the impression that their work will be lauded by adoring fans. Gamers resent everything that EA stands for -- especially their constant profiteering and manipulation -- and begrudgingly buy their games because they're one of the few companies with the budget to create AAA titles.

Takeover by EA is usually considered a death knell for game studios...

> "Takeover by EA is usually considered a death knell for game studios..."

Further to this point: Maxis, makers of Sim City, were notable for a long time as being the glaring exception when it came to EA's habit of buying and squeezing studios to death.

But the writing was on the wall when THE SIMS hit so big and was.. "exploited"[1] so heavily.

And when Will left... well, it's just flat-out inconceivable that anyone remained naive about what EA was going to get up to.

[1] http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/05

I remember when The Sims was first announced, where Maxis was saying "And most of the game isn't even done yet. We've got loads of new stuff we'll release for free online!" which turned into dozens of boxed expansion packs.

Yuck.

Really? Wow, what a bunch of jerks. I am surprised that anyone even wants to buy a game from them after something like that.

Yet they do keep buying, year after year. They want the polish of AAA EA titles as compared to indie fare, and they're willing to bend over to get it.

Its the whole consumer versus content producer battle in a microcosm, and it doesn't make consumers look good. It's easy to get away with being a shitty company like EA when people line up to get "Madden" versus some non-branded sports game.

That's slightly revisionist history. EA bought Maxis when they weren't in great financial shape (it didn't help that basically every Friday was spent at the bar). It's true that the Sims was a huge success that EA didn't anticipate (they repeatedly tried to kill the project), but the jury is still out if Maxis would have survived long enough to release it without EA's funding and support.

  EA bought Maxis when they weren't in great financial shape

I'm not familiar with the specifics, but if Maxis was in such dire straits, why did Wright become the largest shareholder of EA as a result of the takeover? And his partner became CEO for a while.

> Wright become the largest shareholder of EA as a result of the takeover

Sources?

From Wikipedia[1]:

  > The company's IPO took place in 1995. In 1997, after
  > setbacks on a series of secondary titles, Braun and
  > Wright sold Maxis to Electronic Arts for US$120
  > million in stock. The deal made Braun the largest
  > shareholder in EA at the time.

Not Wright, but a result of the purchase.

Also from Wikipedia[2]:

  > Maxis went public in 1995 with revenue of US$38 million.
  > The stock reached $50 a share and then dropped as Maxis
  > posted a loss. EA bought Maxis in June 1997.

and

  > It was a difficult idea to sell to EA, because
  > already 40% of Maxis's employees had been laid
  > off.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Braun

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)

I wasn't remotely talking about money; about why Maxis sold, whether they had to or anything along those lines. You're projecting an argument I never made.

I'm talking purely about the games and the people who make them.

EA buys studios and squeezes them. Why the studios subjected themselves to it is irrelevant to the fact that it happened. Repeatedly. Pretty much non-stop since Trip walked out the door. EA's long-standing treatment of their employees and the properties they owned, in the pursuit of a release schedule that burned out both in short order, is not revisionist history. It is EA's history.

I shed a tear for Westwood studios.

"A Tear?" I'm still in mourning.

Westwood was failing and wasn't going to survive on it's own. It's a sad fact but EA bought them up in order to save the franchises and the jobs of many developers.

I would like to have seen SimMars (and SimCastle).

http://www.shacknews.com/article/60839/new-images-of-maxis-c...

That cartoon is about Bobby Kotick of Activision.

Yes and EA is openly following the same playbook and has been less-openly following it for years. One could argue Activision took it from EA.

Some places in EA are amazing places to work at. Others have challenges. They aren't the only game company that has seen studios do sub-standard work after being acquired.

You're seriously blaming this on Maxis?

I think the respective records of EA and a pre-EA Maxis ought to provide ample evidence of the likely culprit here.

I was speaking more broadly.

This isn't the first time EA has seriously blown a launch due to infrastructure issues I realize. EA's main infrastructure server team runs things like a pre-dotbomb forture 5.

I'm slow to throw blame since EA's acquisitions chose to join EA. Technical Directors at Maxis are just as much to blame as well as product/project managers that fail to squeeze load testing into the busy schedule.

I do (sadly) agree that studios seem to lose their magic to us gamers once they join EA. Why?

> I do (sadly) agree that studios seem to lose their magic to us gamers once they join EA. Why?

I'll give you one guess.

>since EA's acquisitions chose to join EA.

Not quite correct. Maxis' shareholders decided to join EA; I doubt the average programmer, or even the average project manager or tech lead had any say in the process whatsoever.

true. however if (coders ran the world); we would

Are you forgetting Spore? It was Will's baby, and it sucked.

Sucked might be taking it a little far. Though it didn't work well as a game, the editors they created were really, really good. A very nice combination of user friendly and just powerful enough for creativity.

One of my biggest disappointments with the games industry is that those editors never really made their way into the industry at large. One of my greatest hopes after Spore launched was that some company would license those editors and actually build a good game around them. A Dungeon-Keeperesque game with fully editable creatures and dungeon design was a particular dream. Sadly, it never really caught on, and Spore looks to be a mostly dead end.

I thought it did well commercially, though.

"In its first three weeks on sale, the game sold 2 million copies, according to Electronic Arts."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(2008_video_game)

Unfortunately, the citation link is dead on the article. I don't know if this answers your question about commercial success. Maybe someone knows more about this data point in context of the industry.

This cartoon is an interesting take on EA acquisitions...

http://i.imgur.com/zFrTB.jpg

My own personal anecdote is that most of my Bay-Area game-industry contacts were at Maxis: around 8-9 of them. And precisely none of them are still with EA today. Some have left to freelance, some to do indie games, some to do regular tech jobs outside the game industry entirely (e.g. would rather work for Lockheed than EA).

Whoa, Lockheed. Talk about a complete shift in career(s)...though I suppose programming UAVs is in some perverse way reminiscent of game programming. :)

Former game-dev here: Simulation programming is one of the most viable exits for developers looking to get away from the game space.

Thankfully so... I once ran an Ohio-class SSBN aground in a channel in a loss-of-all-possible-NAVAIDS casualty. Luckily it was in a simulator (unluckily, our bosses were there to see it happen).

Your sextant wasn't working?

You can't navigate through "the doglegs" by shooting an azimuth to the sun, that would take too long, it would be safer to DR through on a stopwatch.

Either way though, hard to shoot an accurate azimuth when heavy fog miraculously rolls in out of nowhere and limits visibility to ~100 ft from the bridge. :)

I guess you did say a loss of all navaids though. The sextant was probably used for a bottle opener and broken or something.

> Either way though, hard to shoot an accurate azimuth when heavy fog miraculously rolls in out of nowhere and limits visibility to ~100 ft from the bridge. :)

Well that part is easy. Follow Robert Duvall's advice and call in for a huge napalm strike to lift the fog. It is the smell of victory, right? ;)

I feel bad for the game devs who got to see their hard work turn into something they don't intend.

"Spore" was 5 years ago, FWIW.

Although the servers did not melt at that time, the Amazon ratings and reviews are similar.

Maxis has totally ignored the issue. Look at their Reddit AMA when nearly every question was regarding this, and they didn't even acknowledge it.

Perhaps they were under legal obligation or pressure from EA, but I find it hard to feel sympathy.

It is incredibly likely they were forbidden by management from answering those questions.

Kind of defeats the purpose of doing an AMA if you're not allowed to answer any of the interesting questions. I sympathise if that was the case, but people should remember what the second 'A' stands for.

Well, technically, nothing was censored. So "anything" was asked.

Now if it was "Answer Me Everything"...

It's Ask Me Anything, not I'll tell you everything.

Ask Me Anything About Rampart.

The purpose of the AMA was to promote the game, not satisfy readers' questions. This is the case for all political/corporate AMAs.

If someone drove their car into a lake, you wouldn't be adding anything to the conversation if you said "The purpose of a car was to drive on the road, not to drive into the lake"

In a similar fashion, you don't really add information to the discussion when you make an analogous statement about the misuse of an AMA thread.

The analogous statement to:

'the purpose of the AMA was to promote the game, not satisfy readers' questions, so they didn't answer questions that would reflect negatively on SimCity V.'

Would be:

'the purpose of the car was to drive on the road, not to drive into the lake, so they chose not to drive into the lake.'

Yes, the Ask Me Anything, does not get answers. I noticed this too when former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark was on recently. The AMA wasn't what I'd hoped for at all. Weak. When asked about Kim Dotcom saga the following appears: [–]HelenClarkUNDP[S] 229 points 12 days ago While you can ask anything - don't expect me to dive back into Kiwi political debates! Been there, done that!

They did an AMA but weren't comfortable talking about that? Talk about foresight.

Is the auth space something a startup could occupy? "Easy DRM/Auth for games that doesn't suck?"

All DRM is eventually bypassed, why do game studios even bother?

In this case it's not just DRM; SimCity has social features that clearly require a server.

A social feature that isn't even relevant in solo play. You shouldn't need a network for single play.

The idea here is to force you to be reliant on the network; to move the processing onto their servers.

SimCity isn't a normal game, it's a SaaS game.

SaaS Game, very well put!

Do we need a new acronym for games that required black-box server side components (Not just DRM but entire chunks of game code) not controlled by the consumer?

GaaS? (Game as a Service)?

Ubisoft did the same thing with the last silent Hunter game IIRC.

80% of mobile games are already precisely this, without requiring the coinage of a special term for it.

I was being facetious when I said it.

I was also thinking about PC Games mainly when I said that since it still (touch wood) a rare situation.

To be honest, mobile gaming didn't even appear in my PC-master-race-gaming mind :p

>> SaaS Game ... (Game as a Service)

This is hardly a new concept, Eve Online is a fairly prominent example of a game that is run entirely as a subscription service. I'm sure there are other MMO games that do the same, however there are others like World of Warcraft which combine a subscription service with a "boxed" game client.

In the context of the current discussion, I think EA could have made the new SimCity game entirely service based, like Eve, giving the client software as a free download and charging for access to the server, where most/all of the actual simulation logic would live. Instead they've pulled a bait-and-switch with a boxed product.

I was excluding MMOs from the above since the expectations of those are that they are multi-player and subscription based.

When I was talking about GaaS I was sarcastically talking about ostensibly single-player games are crippled in this way.

Crippleware is a good one too :)

This is the problem though. Their always on DRM doesn't work, they obviously didn't have enough servers to handle the load even though they would have had sales figures before the game launched. Maybe if they launched the game with enough infrastructure to cope, there would be no issue here. As pointed out somewhere else, Blizzard have done this with their last few games; Stacraft 2 (both) and Diablo 3 and people don't complain (even though at the start there were a few teething issues).

I understand the SaaS description, it's a very accurate one but the point is customers have paid for something that is essentially an overpriced server status and countdown application. This is not acceptable, it's not like the game was given away for free. People have paid for something they cannot use.

How would you feel if you just bought a new car, drove it out of the dealership and found-out it had some amazing new technological anti-theft GPS immobiliser in your car that always needed to be connected to the monitoring company network and it was preventing you from driving it out of the dealership? The dealership refuse to refund your money even though they knew the car had this issue, but they sold it anyway so you have to wait for a fix... EA sold us a lemon, I feel very ripped off.

Do EA even test their games any more or do they just develop them, throw some really buggy DRM implementation in and sell as many copies as possible? They're already one of the most hated companies in gaming, I guess they can't really lose out any more, they hit rock bottom a while ago. Much like the music industry, they'll eventually start losing copious amounts of cash and blame piracy instead of themselves. So tired of EA's crap.

Because every hour after release that it's not-yet-cracked equates to a substantial improvement in lifetime revenue.

They're not stupid, they know it's getting cracked. It's just a play for more time.

Maybe the case for non EA games, but considering people won't get to play Simcity within the next 2 weeks or so, there'll be a cracked version out by then. EA have brought themselves nothing but trouble in this situation and being the out-of-touch company they are, they deserve every loss of sale they get.

This isn't like normal DRM, key parts of the game logic and performed server side so you would need to reimplement the server in order to crack it.

Think of it like trying to get a "crack" for 37s Basecamp or similar.

While this might sound as a big problem for crackers, I slightly doubt it. I suspect many crackers has related day-jobs, like reverse engineers. If their day jobs require them to reverse engineer the command structure of a bot net, or make deep package inspection rules for protocols, then reverse engineer a game server is not that complicated thing to do. They are going to have special made tools for this.

Reverse engineering the binaries and network protocols is not going to be so difficult. What would be more time consuming is reverse engineering the mathematical models used for simulation on the backend, you're going to need to observe the input->output map over a lot of possible inputs and to do that you probably need a lot of game clients connected which cost a lot of money. Not to mention not having your fuzzer detected and being banned/sued.

You might be able to eventually do a good enough job that makes your server feel quite close to the official server but then every time the game updates you either have to stick with the old way or do all of your analysis again. So you end up with a divergence between the real game and the pirate game.

It is certainly much more time consuming than figuring out how to set the "isGameValid" in securom to 1 and breaking every securom game out there. In this case you have to individually reverse engineer every single game out there, so at some point you hit the limit of the rescources that game crackers will spend on cracking. Essentially the problem with traditional DRM is that attack is easier than defence, this inverts that relationship.

Some games, WOW for example have people spending significant resources on reverse engineering them (although for different reasons) because there is a financial incentive to do it (you can make money selling rare items). There probably isn't much money in cracking simcity.

> key parts of the game logic and performed server side so you would need to reimplement the server in order to crack it

But game runs just fine for twenty minutes after disconnect (at least it simulates one city fine). You just may lose your progress because game saves "in the cloud".

Steam provides DRM and a marketplace.

Effective DRM is less about technology, and more about incentives. It would not even be hard to implement if the sole goal is to maximize revenue. Sadly, most DRM schemes has a secondary goal of control rather than revenue maximization.

So how would this work: 1) have a early launch code included in collector versions and pre-order, for something around 1 week. 2) include a special DRM system for only the pre-launch week, and announce that it will be removed after the pre-launch week.

the benefits: 1) Crackers are people, and there is little incentives for 1 week crack. A honor system could also encourage them to avoid cracking the game, if this model is made in honest. 2) Buyers are people, and those that would buy the game at launch (90-95% of revenue) will not have a pirate game to pick from. 3) pirates are people, and those that rather wait for a crack will wait here too.

True.

Yay! The Big-Enterprison teaches the youth VERY effectively why it scks by destroying their fun* with games ... this time: Simcity.

Is this "disaster" some sort of an ideological paradox intervention?

How bad can this get? I mean how do you manage to fail at such scale with a brand like this. Don't they need the money anymore? Don't they want it?

Interesting.

>Work for our small team. We won't destroy your work.

A small team might not. However, they also won't have the resources typical a larger triple-A product either. Nor will your game have a marketing team behind it to draw gamer attention with.

Without that, your game has to have a combination of cleverness and buzz. The latter requires a certain degree of luck.

EA needs to pivot this game, fast.

Even in the best case scenario, where the servers all get fixed this evening and the game works flawlessly for everyone for a month straight, the damage to the game's name has been done. The meme is hatched: SimCity 2013 has a highly brittle dependency on poorly-planned cloud infrastructure.

There's a private region mode in the game (that you nonetheless can't use offline in the current architecture). EA needs to have Maxis crunch for the next couple of weeks to make this work offline. Yes, I've read the nebulous quotes about "part of the sim happening in the cloud." Whatever that is, they'll have to move it to the client.

Once offline play is possible, if EA wants any chance to make back its investment on this game, they're going to have to first promote the new offline mode, and then spend the next couple of months doing some post-launch rescoping of the multiplayer aspect. They can still make it work; it could still be fantastic – but they have to move fast.

(I just have to say, to give more than just an upvote, this is a great post.)

> The meme is hatched: SimCity 2013 has a highly brittle dependency on poorly-planned cloud infrastructure.

To the tech-literate crowd, this will be the meme. But for the average gamer, the meme is different, and I might argue worse: Sim City simply doesn't work.

The meme I see tends to be: EA ruins everything.

EA's success to failure rate tends to be lower than its competitors.

Or, one could say, EA's definition of success is different than many of its competitors.

Only if they havent laid off the game devs after the master copy was done.

Diablo 3 was pretty horrible at first too for the same reason. I don't know if you will call that a success or failure though.

Anecdotally, I still have people dismiss Diablo 3 over the connectivity issues at launch, and make error 37 comments. Even from people who played through the issues and stuck around for a bit, it's the thing that stands out most for them.

Success or failure depends on your definition of success here. Successful game, sure. Successful sequel to Diablo 2, it doesn't seem to have the same popularity, and I think the connection issues at launch framed a lot of people's opinions about the game.

I've had Diablo 3 since day one and played successfully to level 60 with two characters, never had any problems with connection. And SimCity doesn't work sometimes - it just doesn't work at all.

You weren't playing Diablo 3 at release then.

Give EA time and Sim City will stabilize as well as D3 has, either because they've expanded hardware, or shrunk their user base.

Well I was. But my point is that it was a hit-or-miss. I managed to play without problems but I had friends who could not connect. SimCity is not like that. SimCity just does not work at all.

On the flip side, I've had friends playing simcity just fine. So, yeah.

Haha thanks for reminding me about the error 37 video by francis. Classic! I remember that error lasting for several days after launch.

Remember EA is a business, not an offshoot of Reddit/HN. Imagine you're the SimCity product manager and the choice was between a massive refactor or provisioning a bunch of new servers. Which would you choose?

I'd love to agree with you, but I just dont think its plausible.

One-time cost vs. ongoing cost for years to come? It's not as simple as you make it out to be.

Best compromise: create a "local" version of the server.

I seem to recall that the reason for the cloud based server was to leverage more number crunching power to yield better AI. Running it locally might not help. (Though, it certainly is better than no server, and it'd be interesting if they let people tune the fidelity of the processing so that it could run locally, or on a private server.)

I highly doubt they are providing server resources for every player that are more powerful than the player's desktop or laptop computer. Surely that would be extremely expensive.

I agree - at a very low 100MHz per player that's 25 players to a 2.5GHz Xeon core, 100 per CPU, 200 per server. Assume 100,000 players, that's 500 decently spec'd servers plus redundancy, bandwidth, storage, sysadmins, etc.

Your probably right, but maybe if you are doing all the calculations for everyone in one place you can start to make large scale use of dynamic programming techniques over time?

Right, and Diablo 3 was online-only to solve the problem of not being able to play with your friends.

And I forget what the excuse was for Command & Conquer 4.

It's just DRM first and foremost.

yeah it. EA shuts down the servers when they are tired of paying for them. Game dies. Sim City get puts on madden schedule.

Or, slightly less cynically, demand is always orders of magnitude higher for the first week or two after release, so it's only a short term investment in servers if they can be merged later.

The point is at some point they could pull the plug. I still play older version of SimCity to this day.

Sure they could. But if I get £40 of value from my game before they do, I can live with that. It's not ideal, but it doesn't make it a poor purchase.

I think there is a broader cultural loss though.

In the future years when "study of video game history" becomes a thing, people will be able to examine and analyse old games like SimCity 2000 by actually playing them as they were. Since they have been archived and preserved by wide distribution.

Then as you get further into the future maybe you start to come across games where you have to say "sadly the only existing copy of the server code was lost in the great github fire of 2020, so all we can show you is this archived footage".

> so all we can show you is this archived footage.

You mean the tens of thousands of videos that will be posted. Historians will have no shortage of source material.

I'd actually argue that the videos are more valuable as they show first hand how the game was played at the time. Think a recording of a long-forgotten instrument compared to the actual instrument, which is more valuable?

I think there's quite a difference between playing and watching. Think of it like trying to understand Shakespeare based on clips from Baz Luhrmann's reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet.

I absolutely agree that that's a loss, but that argument would seem to apply equally to all online games. But a game isn't less worth playing because it's online, right?

It potentially applies to any game without wide distribution of all required software. An online game where the server software was available to the public could potentially last forever, for example it is still possible to play early betas of counterstrike.

One solution may be to propose an escrow system.

A neutral non profit (or several) sets up an entity which exists to collect software binaries and/or source code from companies under strict NDA.

At some event, either after a period of time or at the time in which the service based on that software ceases to operate; the software is released to the public (either for free or for some payment to the escrow entity).

In return the company gets a "no abandonware" sticker it can use in it's marketing/branding which gives consumers confidence in their purchase.

I would have fought to develop a working offline mode from the beginning

Fought and lost.

I agree with you that adding a bunch of servers looks like the simpler (cheaper, in terms of Net Present Value) option. But I worry that however they've set it up is just not horizontally scalable.

They say that a large bunch of the simulation runs on their servers. And that each city is connected (via the graph) to every other city. What if they haven't built in clean partitioning? If cities really do interact with every other city, and they've haven't already seriously planned how to horizontally scale, they're hosed.

If it were just a matter of adding more hosts, wouldn't they have done that by now? Surely you over-provision for launch and then scale down once the first sales are over and people's interest dies down.

Everything you said is completely sane. With that said :

EA's SimCity 5 (the newest release) stores towns and character profiles on a per server basis, meaning 'US West 1' and 'US West 2' are different. You must even re complete the forced tutorial if changing servers.

It's unclear what parts of are being offloaded to the servers. Possibly only the 'global economy' stuff, along with other 'social' features. A client can be disconnected for 20-30 minutes and maintain a stable game until the client forces the eventual disconnection "Because a connection to Origin cannot be maintained". Strange for the gameplay to not noticeably change when disconnected from the machines that are supposedly running simulation for you..

The answer is neither.

They've already ruined their "second day" sales, and they have the money for their uninformed first day buyers already. Their best option is to ignore the pleb's while demand dies off enough that their existing infrastructure is adequate

The game sold more than a million copies and gamers are notoriously short term memory combined with short term attention span. Not only will this game start working fine after half the people who bought this game forget about it in a week. But the people who bought it and are mad about it now, won't be in a week.

The same thing has been happening for a long time. If you are a gamer, you are sharing space with petulance. You can pretend all you want that games are designed and built with an adult in mind but adults aren't the target market.

This predictably happens at the release of almost every anticipated game that requires a central server connection. There is initial downtime and lag, angry gamers write lots of horrible reviews, then things eventually get better and nobody cares anymore that it used to be broken.

Some of us have caught onto this cycle and are learning discipline. I personally didn't buy the game because I figured something like this might happened... problem is that the window of opportunity for EA to get my money is quickly closing as I await to see them fix the issues and make things right for the people that have suffered through it.

Absolutely none of this is going to happen.

They'd just see this as an issue with the server infrastructure , not the game. They'll just get more servers online, people will start to play and then the complaining will die down.

I dont think it will hurt their sales as much as you're implying anyway. I've just purchased it, knowing about the server issues, but also knowing it's going to come good soon enough.

They won't do it. It would mean being intelligent.

Can we talk about this more clearly?

This isn't strictly "evil DRM" as people are highlighting.

Unlike some other games, it's not like SimCity is just phoning home to figure out if it is licensed or not, and preventing unlicensed copies.

SimCity depends on EA/Maxis' server infrastructure for a great deal of storage and computation related to the macro-scale components of each game. Not only is city state synced there and shared between players, but regional dynamics and macro-scale economic systems are continuously maintained in the EA cloud. There's plenty of other features that are done server-side, and in total they represent a substantial piece of this game.

We can argue about whether these things should be computed and stored in the cloud, but I think there is a plausible, if imperfect, argument for doing so; Many players are involved and system resources are scarce relative to simulation complexity.

Regardless, the use of the cloud in this game is for more than just to deter pirates. That much is clear. And it's also clear that EA cannot "simply remove the DRM" and expect people to have a full offline experience; this is a primarily multiplayer game.

Indeed, this seems part of a trend in the games industry--that of bringing MMO(massively multiplayer online) experiences to more games. Call it social or something else, more games are working to get people to play with others. It's good business and actually creates some special experiences.

In any case, EA/Maxis have clearly not executed the launch for SimCity well. With 10 years of pent-up demand, it would have been wise to provision more server side resources to keep the experience good. It's hard to keep up with so many users, and perhaps a longer beta period would have helped.

But as a SimCity player and vet, I'll say that stripping out the online piece of this game doesn't make sense, and that piece was certainly designed for the benefit of gamers.

It's not strictly DRM or EA milking their customers.

I don't think you're adding clarity here.

People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copies. There is no technical reason for its absence.

The cloud based stuff sounds great, and if it were an optional extra that was unavailable at launch due to technical difficulties, I doubt you'd see a hundredth as much bad PR.

Isn't:

> We can argue about whether these things should be computed and stored in the cloud, but I think there is a plausible, if imperfect, argument for doing so

Conceivably true? We could be in a world with no DRM, but there would still be a market trend moving games towards a more social, connected and integrated experience; and some developers will be looking at ways to fundamentally build their new games in a way that takes advantage of this. Why not SimCity? The Sims 3 already indicated where the Sims franchise might be heading with regards to improved connectivity with friends, I don't think it's an entirely unreasonable leap to get to where SimCity is now.

Which isn't to say that DRM wouldn't have been a business consideration at an executive level; but there's definitely an argument that SimCity's design choices, even if flawed, can be justified without considering DRM.

Conceivable, but a real stretch. It would imply that they considered adding a single player mode, knowing that there would be demand for it, but decided it would be too difficult given their other design decisions to make it worth adding. Or as Diablo 3 players like to joke, "the technology just isn't there yet" to do something that previous games already did successfully.

No. One thing is to offer a "social mode", even to push it hard in terms of marketing or menu placement or whatever, another to require a connection at all times, even in "sandboxed mode" where you're not going to interact with anyone else -- which is completely preposterous, and it's done only because of DRM.

If the problem was "going social", you'd see more p2p and lan-gaming features, rather than "let's all connect to my servers, creating huge scalability problems which may or may not be solved at some point".

> to require a connection at all times, even in "sandboxed mode" where you're not going to interact with anyone else -- which is completely preposterous

this is not preposterous at all. if all the simulation happens on the server side, its not necessarily trivial to have that run on the client. maybe the server requires unix. maybe the server requires an oracle database.

We have plenty of simulation games that run client side. My ipad is faster than the PCs that ran SimCity 3000. They made a poor decision to move this to the cloud as a hack proof drm attempt and they are facing the consequences now.

The simulation happens locally, it's only saved server-side at point-in-time; which is why people are losing hours of gameplay to failed saves.

But I don't think we're living in that world where MMOs/Zynga social games are this hot new thing that every single game has to move towards.

We lack the internal knowledge to know whether an offline mode would have been a good experience for most customers. I have no idea whether Maxis+EA tested this, and how well it worked.

That said, you can imagine a situation where doing these computations locally did compromise the experience for a certain spec of machines. Maxis has already explained that city size limits were imposed because the simulation didn't run sufficiently well on the low-mid spec machines above the allowed size.

As the owner of a higher spec machine, I find it somewhat silly that this couldn't just be a preference item (as AA and resolution are), but I can understand the decision to cut down the computational demands to keep gameplay smooth.

Games that have launched with framerate issues recently have met a huge amount of flak--see what's going on in the Planetside 2 community. You can argue that what's happening to PS2 is far worse: they released a poorly optimized game, and those issues prevented people from playing for months.

You're saying that the client PCs are so weak, yet EA can offload it into the cloud for cheap? How exactly does that work? My 3-year-old ultralight laptop has as much CPU as an EC2 M1 large.

I find it hard to believe the game is so complicated a laptop will struggle, but EA can efficiently load it onto servers? That sounds pretty hard to believe. Even if the target player is using a crappy Netbook, you're talking about a dedicated compute server for every 4-20 players. That's insane.

SimCity system requirements:

Intel players will need, minimally, a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, while our AMD players will need at least a an Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+.

Those sound pretty capable of a significant amount of simulation themselves...

Yep they ran Simcity 4 fine.

This is an over-simplification of the performance demands of the game. Keep in mind that there are many levels of computation involved in the simulation, from rendering loads to inter-agent complexity, to city management (i.e. taxes). It all adds up, and the graphics needs alone are the limiter in most games.

But beyond the "feather that broke the camel's back" rationale for offloading compute, keep in mind that there are issues around shared data that would vastly improve performance of region-level computations in the cloud. If the region state is maintained in the cloud, any computations on that state will be far more quick when done in a centralized way.

Further, there are fewer challenges around handling client desynchronization, which is a classic problem in large scale strategy games. Reconciling one or more desync'd client's state can get very difficult. Under a centralized system, the master copy reigns.

Obviously there are downsides, but it's not like it's a crazy idea to offload some of the compute to the cloud.

Really? You're suggesting they use a software renderer instead of the GPU? Even if 70% of the CPU was wasted on a modern machine, that's like a quarter core per user that they'd need to rent from Amazon. I don't think so.

As far as the multiplayer, I don't think anyone has a problem needing servers for multiplayer.

All I'm saying is that the suggestion that computations need to be done online to save local CPU, even on a singleplayer game, is obviously ridiculous.

I doubt they are using EC2, probably buying servers in bulk from IBM or whoever.

When you centralise you also have other advantages, such as being able to cache the results of previous computations. So if you can structure the computations in such a way as to be fully or partially reusable you can memoize and scale much better.

If you google for people attempting to reverse engineer the protocol you'll see that they've found that EA is indeed using EC2. It is however unclear if this is a permanent state of affairs or if they're simply using EC2 in an attempt to handle the initial burst of traffic

>People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copies. There is no technical reason for its absence.

I see this sentiment expressed pretty often, but in this case it seems flawed. From what I understand, you can't build a city that does everything, instead you rely on the other cities in your 'region.'

The new Simcity is no more single player than World of Warcraft. The previous games were single player, as they focused on a monolithic city. This game is designed from the ground up with the assumption that you will play with other people. There's no technical restrictions preventing Blizzard from offering single-person servers for WoW, it just doesn't follow from the game design. The same is true here.

I think you're really missing the parent commenter's point, which is: "Why isn't there a single player mode, given that previous SimCity releases have done just fine as single player games?"

WoW relies on active human beings to make its world lively and addicting. I don't think that need is as prevalent in a sim game, where the game AI itself can...well...simulate the regional qualities that would affect a player's city well enough.

In SC4 there was region play. You just played each city in the region locally. It work. Cities XL does simulation locally. Tropico does some but much less.

Orrrr you could just program some simple AI for the other cities in your 'region'.

It's possible to have a single-player experience, where one player controls all of the cities in a private 'region'. It's alluded to here: http://kotaku.com/5988848/tips-for-playing-simcity Ironically, if they hadn't included that feature, arguments such as yours would have a lot more weight, but as it is there is a purely-single-player experience, and you still needlessly connect to a server for it. (I don't own the game, just going off what I've read on the Internet)

And even if this were lacking, I for one would still be demanding it, and that it would work entirely offline.

>I see this sentiment expressed pretty often, but in this case it seems flawed. From what I understand, you can't build a city that does everything, instead you rely on the other cities in your 'region.'

How is this any different from a single-player RPG where you control a party of characters which all depend on one another's unique abilities?

From what I understand, you can't build a city that does everything, instead you rely on the other cities in your 'region.'

The previous title in the series quite happily did this all locally. Log in and be presented with the area and all the city locations in a grid, pick one and build.

I'd like to second what you're saying. The ability to play with my friends in our own private regions is an awesome one, and one I'm glad they included. Frankly, I would have no problem with anything they're doing if it just worked. The big mistake here, imho,is that EA is a huge company, they should have set aside the resources to make this experience great.

You make a lot of good points. But I've argued this before: it seems highly unlikely that EA is doing any kind of expensive calculation server-side that couldn't be equally done offline in a single player mode.

It's possible for providers to install hardware where each player gets computational resources that rival their own -- OnLive does it. But OnLive also charges a monthly fee for it. And the offloading is only significant compared to, essentially, thin clients, not gaming PCs.

So the simulation offloading argument is just bogus. But of course it's consistent to argue that SimCity is a multiplayer game, full stop, that a single player version, while feasible, would simply be so unattractive that they aren't going to support it; just like Actiblizzard doesn't offer offline WOW. But I assume lots of people are in fact playing essentially single player in a private region, and of course SimCity was a solitary experience in the past.

>> SimCity depends on EA/Maxis' server infrastructure for a great deal of storage and computation related to the macro-scale components of each game.

The problem is that most people's perception is that it really doesn't need to, that the core engine could have been implemented to run entirely locally and the online-only features would be optional.

It's all well and good if the game has social features or other enhancements that are only enabled if you are online. But could the game have been implemented such that the core single-player gameplay is available without an internet connection?

Most people perceive the answer to that question to be "yes". If the answer truly is yes, then implementation of the game in this way is DRM.

>> this is a primarily multiplayer game

If that's true, I'd say the one-star reviews are just as justified. This game was marketed as the continuation of a series that has been predominantly single-player. I'd say there's a reasonable expectation that the game should work without an internet connection. I wouldn't expect World of Warcraft to work without an internet connection, but I expect SimCity to. I wouldn't expect Dead Space 3's co-op to work without an internet connection, but I would expect the single-player campaign to work without one, and it does.

Regardless, the use of the cloud in this game is for more than just to deter pirates. That much is clear.

So you're right that its not "evil DRM" in the traditional sense, that shit failed and publishers moved on years ago. Online components, and preferable mandatory online components is the new AAA game anti-piracy, anti-secondary-market strategy.

EA could have designed a more resilient architecture without sacrificing the multi-player/social aspects. But they didn't, why not?

> I think there is a plausible, if imperfect, argument for doing so; Many players are involved and system resources are scarce relative to simulation complexity.

Game reviewers like Polygon knowingly played prerelease code on private development server, and reported no major issues. In addition, EA recently cut back on game features and disabled the fastest game mode to help their servers cope -- some additional indication that servers are doing a fair amount of work to service the game.

I agree it sounds like a solvable problem made difficult by overwhelming demand. And for some number of reasons, they cannot increase server capacity sufficiently to solve it. This sounds more like a failure of server engineering than an overly aggressive DRM strategy.

[1] http://www.polygon.com/game/simcity-2013/2630 [2] http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/7/4075120/simcity-servers-upda...

Relaxing their overly aggressive DRM strategy would easily reduce the need for servers by order (orders?) of magnitude, so it would be a possible solution.

No, but it's hardly confidence inspiring for the brave new world of 100% micropayment coverage that EA wants to train us to enjoy.

I'll bet good money that the game was designed from scratch to require a constant connection or otherwise the project would not be approved.

Honest question: have you played the new game?

I got a few hours in before I ran into the issues everyone outlined, but after having built a pretty sizable city, my impression is that the multiplayer/online aspects of the game are pretty much worthless. It feels more like a feature box being checked than a core element of the game. I get the impression that they tried, but it ultimately feels incongruent with the core mechanics.

There's another element, which is a bit hazier, but being that this game is a sequel, there are certain expectations that people come into it with for a Sim City game -- expectations which aren't met. Sim City is a game about playing mayor, and all the social nonsense is sort of getting in the way of that experience. Especially since the whole "online" aspect has kept me from playing it today AT ALL, because the "server is full" -- despite the fact that I played 10 hours yesterday and felt no need to interact with anyone. I'd happily leave behind the whole social nonsense and just play the damn game if it would let me.

This isn't a proper Sim City game. It's like going to a restaurant and ordering spaghetti, and getting something entirely different. Sure I want the restaurant's take on spaghetti, but you can't stray too far without inventing a new dish. I wanted spaghetti, and instead I got mac and cheese. Some people might like mac and cheese, but that's not what I came here to get, and I'm disappointed.

> This isn't a proper Sim City game.

To me it felt like I'm playing DRM with features inspired from simcity. Sadly, I'm not joking.

I've been playing the game for the last few days with a handful of friends. What I've found is that without the region dynamics, my cities have comparatively stunted growth and seem to be deficient in a few areas. Even with regions that I try and manage myself, the time freezing mechanic in unmanned cities makes progress much slower.

When my friends are building cities around me, we move really fast and the supply chain and people sharing mechanics can create some truly startling results. It's a very different experience from SC4, and I'll say its only a bad thing if you play alone.

The fundamental problem with Sim City is that it is historically a single-player, offline experience. And it didn't help that this is the first true Sim City we've seen since 2003 (Sim City 4) and many media hyped this game to be possibly the best Sim City yet, and the most realistic city simulation experience.

Yes, there may be technical limitations that required processing to happen on EA servers. And yes, they make it clear on the front of the box that an internet connection is required to play the game.[1]

But most people purchasing this game expected that for the most part, this would be primarily a single player just like the previous titles, and that the internet connection is only required for DRM and/or occasional online interaction. They don't realize that a lot of the engine lives in the cloud.

So there is a different level of disappointment because of the expectations that were there. If this had been a follow-up to an MMO, they would have known that the game heavily depended on server performance, and it may have been a little more forgivable.

But most people don't understand why the game doesn't work. "Just disable DRM for now. Or disable multiplayer interactions. Make it offline only for now."

What I can't believe is that this isn't just minor hiccups with the launch -- this is catastrophic failure. Why couldn't better load testing simulate and predict what they're seeing today?

Regardless, as many have said, this will ruin the name of Sim City, at least for a period, and will cause even more bitterness with EA than what already exists.

[1]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/815mDnNUDhL._SL1121_.j...

As a game author I am very ashamed of what the industry has been doing in the last few years.

It started with FPS mania... Then crazy DRM that destroyed your PC (Starforce I am looking to you).

Then... more crazy DRM! (SecuROM, that for example refused to launch Spore on dual-GPU laptops).

Then online only DRM...

Then DLC mania (Horse Armor, I am looking to you... unfortunately as the harbinger of something much worse past you).

Then Diablo III (and now SC5) managed to be the first games I don't want to play even borrowed, pirated or given to me. If someone give me a DIII CD, I won't even re-sell it and inflict something evil on someone, I will just throw it on the trash, because online-only DRM for Single Player game, transforming the game into a sort of cloud-based service, is one of the most evil things that companies could invent, specially because they can just yank the game from you when they wish (also you cannot have fun cheating alone or modding, cannot play when you are deployed in some war without internet on the HQ or live in the third world, cannot play if you deride EA/Activision/Ubisoft on the forums and they decide to ban you...)

Can't play when the company decides to stop spending money on servers...meaning your game will actually expire and stop working one day.

It started with FPS mania

You could go a bit further back and say it started with Atari 2600 era shovelware.

The title of the 5-star review Amazon highlighted as the helpful is delightful: "Got me off my video game addiction!"

If there isn't some kind of anti-DRM movement surrounding these review this game might break some kind of record for worst reviews. As of now there are 737 1-star reviews.

Spore (the last Big Game released by Maxis through EA) is currently holding that record, I believe.

   By September 14, 2008 (ten days after the game's initial Australian release),
   2,016 of 2,216 ratings on Amazon.com gave the game one out of five stars,
   most citing EA's implementation of DRM for the low ratings. [1]

Spore's DRM issues were different, however.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(2008_video_game)#DRM_con...

I actually legitimately hated Spore for its gameplay. So much promise and hype...such poor execution.

Spore was really great in that different people could learn to hate it in completely different ways.

Clearly EA suffered dearly for it, and have made sure never to repeat the mistake. :(

For what it's worth, my son enjoyed the bejesus out of Spore, and even used his own money to get expansions.

There were expansions to spore?

Oh boy...

The dev team did an IAMA on Reddit a few months ago, where this was all foreshadowed:

http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/14v8er/drama...

This sums it up http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLYLmsEBGug

When a game requires an internet connection to work we call it DRM and slam it. When a text editor or spreadsheet requires an internet connection to run we call it innovation.

The situation isn't as simple as you put it. This time, there is single player game that shouldn't need forced interactivity with an internet connection. Compared to a text editor where the internet connection allowed multiple users to operate on it at the same time.

That and I'm not spending 60$ for Google Docs access.

What editor are you using that requires a live connection? - If its cloud based: apples vs oranges - If not, get a better editor.

Online spreadsheets or docs allow you to export to a locally accessible format. SimCity does not.

There is a significant difference between wanting to do something locally and an internet connection being required and wanting to do something on the internet because it works better than what you have locally.

> When a text editor or spreadsheet requires an internet connection to run we call it innovation.

I would be raging if my text editor required an internet connection for me to access my local files. Al Capone rage even.

Requiring and supporting are two completely different animals. If text editors and spreadsheets actually requiring you to have an internet connection, then I can see people criticizing about it.

I think he is referring to Google Docs/Drive.

EA is offering refunds but only in some cases, with a very haphazard criteria: http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18gs2vgs50fjijpg/original.jp...

Wow. "you can of course request a refund" in a press release actually means you can request a refund, but it will be refused? Just... wow.

I think that has to be the most amazing customer service interaction I have ever seen. I hope EA's payment processor hits them hard over all those charge backs.

Unlikely. If you're on Origin and ask your bank a chargeback, they'll block your account and hold all your legally bought games hostage.

That would be the same as any cloud service(PSN, Steam, Google Play, App Store…), which is a shame, and should be forbidden by law since the consumer gets zero protection in this case.

You could most likely just call your credit card company and dispute the charge. If you bought the game, then can't connect to the server, then EA never actually gave you the game. Provided you give up and remove the game from your account, of course.

I was initially apprehensive about the server-based architecture of the game. However, after playing it for a few hours and being pleasantly surprised, I can now see why they did it. There's a concepts of multiplayer regions with cities that contact each other, and it's more than simply visiting the city.

It's a full economic simulation in which you can sell excess electricity supplies to other cities, lend them public services such as police or fire protection, build mass transit like commuter rail between cities, etc. Long story short, I was surprised to find that there are a lot of features that legitimately need a server. I initially expected the server-based system to be purely for the purposes of DRM, but anyone playing it can probably determine that it's a bit more than that.

Now if they can wrinkle out the bugs and get the servers running (which is, don't get me wrong, a huge huge huge issue right now), I'll be happy.

> you can sell excess electricity supplies to other cities, lend them public services such as police or fire protection, build mass transit like commuter rail between cities, etc.

That was already possible in Sim City 4. Even in older versions (Sim City 2000 iirc) you had neighbor cities and could buy and sell utilities. Those features work just as well when controlled by AI. There is just no reason not to implement it aside from the DRM benefit.

I'm not going to lie: I will buy this game as soon as someone cracks the DRM and allows single, offline play.

You mean, when someone reverse engineers their massively multiplayer server scheme and rewrites an entire server wrapper for a game that follows the client/server paradigm?

This isn't a case where a client-only software package is locked by a remote server.

This is a case where core game logic is stored on servers and will have to be reverse engineered or emulated on some level to play truly offline.

It wouldn't be the first time where such game-servers are actually reverse engineered and emulated.

Hell, that's how I got into reversing a decade ago. I spent years reverse-engineering Everquest to work on server emulators, as well as an open-source client replacement. Quite the gateway drug.

It took years, but this was done with Battle.net for some older Blizzard games.

Mainly because it Battle.net is just IRC.

I mean of the actual game back-end for things like Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft II. There was a complete replacement for Battle.Net that, unfortunately, ended up mired by legal concerns.

I kind of started poking around at the backend protocol this morning. It's all websockets over HTTPS (very trendy stuff) and is hosted on EC2. I'm yet to dig much further than "let's see what this looks like in wireshark", but the behaviour and some of the errors I've observed in-game point to some kind of sync-every-now-and-then architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if it was really easy to do up a custom server for it.

I'm going to keep poking at this thing, so I'll document what I find here: https://gist.github.com/deoxxa/5111644 - feel free to join in!

Which makes it surprising that they didn't design it so they could spool up more servers as required, and gentle shut them back down once interest in the game wanes.

More surprising again is that they actually have three completely active (as far as I can tell) environments that are just sitting there unused.

The "hidden" servers are probably due to the game not being released in Europe yet. I'm assuming they are reserved capacity for when hundreds of thousands of new users join.

That makes a lot of sense, I hadn't thought about that.

Yes. Whatever the case may be.

Ultima Online was completely reverse engineered and then re-deployed to host the cracked version at a state where lots of players liked it. Prior to the devs breaking the way some users preferred it.

Do I doubt this will happen, No. Do I expect it to happen tomorrow? No.

But I expect either this to happen, or EA to fix this problem. When its fixed, I'll buy the game.

There's absolutely no need. The game runs for 20 minutes with no internet connection. All the logic runs locally, and will be cracked. The only thing that needs to be emulated is the save/load system.

I'm pretty sure the core game logic is not on the servers, as widely reported -- I was playing from 9-12PM CST last night, and the servers were supposedly completely down from 10-12PM -- I was able to continue playing in my city, and wasn't kicked until I attempted to interact with the region.

Granted, anything having to do with the region (imports/exports, shared upgrades, etc) was defunct.

Additionally, when you exit a city, there's a long pause where your client sends the city state to the server to be persisted (or so the UI tells me) -- another indication that the simulation is not run on the server.

My current impression is that the entire city simulation is done on the client, and the server is simply responsible for intra-city interactions and persisting game state.

100% agree with this. I got kicked out of a game because of "network issues" last night and when I logged back in, the city I'd spent a good 40 minutes starting up was nowhere to be found. It did, however, remember that I'd claimed that city.

Not sure how it changed after the release, but I remember there being alpha or pre-alpha WoW servers.

I don't understand why people buy games from EA? I mean, seriously, why buy it?

They have been pulling this crap for years and each new release just gets progressively worse.

About a year ago I decided if it's not on Steam I'm not buying it. It really sucks to miss out on some of the games, but I refuse to support such an asshole of a company.

I bought Battlefield 3 from EA and all the expansions. It's been a great experience so far on the PC, and they've kept the community updated on upcoming patches and changed, worked through balance issues and cracked down on exploits and hacks. Now granted probably a lot of that is DICE, but they're as much as a part of EA as Maxis is so I don't necessarily think it's all EA.

As a consumer: If my £40 game gives me £40 of entertainment, I will buy it.

This held for Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3. And considering the reviews it has been receiving, I'm confident this will be true for SimCity once the early server issues have been ironed out.

I'm looking forward to buying it, and I haven't bought a game in years. While there are definitely a lot of people out there who really wanted the game on day 1, and are very hurt that they might not be able to play it very much for a few days, I'm guessing the majority of people who will buy SC during its lifetime will not be affected buy it, will not care, and won't even be consciously aware that it's published by EA or its reputation.

I'm going to disagree slightly.

The primary "DRM" in this game is not DRM in the sense of something that attempts to control your computer in such a way as you can not make copies or run an unauthorised version.

The DRM here is about moving game logic to a server under EA's control. I think this is the correct way to do DRM in that it works and does not require locked down client platforms or invasive rootkits.

I would much prefer to pay for something as a service than have some third party try and take control of my computer. After all, people don't complain about 37 signals , google or World of warcraft for their business models which essentially amount to the same sort of "DRM".

The issues here seem to be that:

EA didn't plan for the demand and make sure that enough servers were available.

Since there is no monthly service fee, there will come a point at which it is no longer economical for EA to run the servers. This will make the game unplayable unless there is some plan by which they will release the server software for download after X years.

There are certain expectations built around the SimCity brand, mainly that the games have high and timeless replayability and that they can be played in isolation. I wonder if the game had been named "Simcity online" would have changed the reception?

"Guess what? If you'd love to experience the nonstop thrills and excitement of SimCity, then please remove $60 from your bank and promptly pay someone to kick you repeatedly in the friggin' mouth." - Ouch! Once again EA fucks up another great gaming franchise that could have made them a lot of money by implementing DRM that doesn't work. I know Blizzard did this with Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2, but at least their servers could handle the load...

Not surprised. EA is a failure of a company being run into the ground by greedy and paranoid CEO's who essentially treat their customers like criminals. I feel sorry for the developers who obviously did an amazing job, the new Simcity seems like a well-built game with smart AI developed by no doubt some of the smartest minds in development, such a shame most people will never get a chance to play the game before demanding refunds.

The uninformed will blame the developers but it's the fault of EA itself, not the developers who did an amazing job. I want to play this game, but I'm going to download the cracked version when it's released instead because it'll actually work.

What was wrong with Starcraft 2?

Nothing. That is my point. Starcraft have always on DRM, but they did it right. You need an internet connection for single play in SC2 as well as Diablo 3 and they did it right at least. There were a few teething problems, but it worked.

Where's Steve Jobs when you need him?

> Steve Jobs summoned the MobileMe team to the Town Hall > auditorium on Apple’s Cupertino campus for an obscenity- > laden dressing down. ‘You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,’ > he told them. ‘You should hate each other for having let > each other down.’ Then he named a new executive on the spot > to run the team.”

http://macdailynews.com/2011/05/08/steve-jobs-to-those-respo...

Although it is more likely in this case that the EA executives mandated online only to the developers.

No doubt. Doesn't mean you have to implement it badly though.

Agreed! But having worked at a company similar to EA, I know the developer may have wanted to implement certain things a certain way, but may not have been able to due to corporate mandates. For example, they may have wanted to deploy using AWS, but their CTO demanded they use the in-house infrastructure he has been working on. Obviously just speculation, but things like this happen all the time at large companies where internal factions put their own agendas ahead of the product and users. I would just hold off blaming Maxis or the development team until more is known.

Here's the thing though: they DID use AWS (one of their EU servers is 46.137.165.11). They have no excuse besides poor architecture design for not simply doubling server capacity.

Right, but I'm just saying that there isn't nearly enough information to claim the devs let down the CEO (as the parent comment implied). We don't know why things are failing, or or who made the decisions that let to the problems. We don't even know if they have tried to throw more servers at the problem (I hope so).

I agree that given the narrow scope of the online plain in SimCity, they should have an architecture that scales easily. I hope they do a public post-portem.

What I'm failing to understand is how a company the size of EA could launch a game with strict online requirements and fail to deliver online capabilities.

I think the bigger the company the more likely it is to happen. You may have separate teams in separate locations with differing agendas. One building the game, another managing infrastructure, not necessarily on the same page or with the same goals. Software team will say they want the best user experience. The IT team might be hearing they need to get costs under control, so they are going to try and be efficient and not over capacity. The software guys may have had a passion for single player, but marketing needs them to add features they are not passionate about. They spend less time on and the features end up less robust.

Why? I see this over and over again in this thread, but I don't believe it anymore because it is not just a one-off case of the developers being ignored, they're willingly doing bad practices like this over and over and over again.

Best case: They do it reluctantly, but don't care enough about their work to stop it. Worst case: They do it willingly and think it is a great idea.

I wish developers had more power, but believe me, 90% of the time they are completely beholden to their publisher. In this case, Maxis is a 100% owned subsidiary of EA. They have no ability to kill the project walk way in protest (other than individuals quitting). The most you can do is plead your case, but it is ultimately EA execs making the call.

I'd edit this into my last comment, but it is too late. Anyway, note this exchange on Twitter with the SimCity producer, Ocean Quigley.

Iain Kidd ‏@oceanquigley Just wondering if you regret the decision as creative director to refuse to provide an offline mode now?

Ocean Quigley ‏@iainkidd Making a lot of assumptions there.

https://twitter.com/oceanquigley/status/309710429687537664

... And iCloud is still weak.

Sorry, but no.

I should not hate people because we weren't able to develop another new product that made you another billion.

That's not a healthy work/life balance, that's a cult.

Nice how it works, eh? Product is good, love Jobs because he created the conditions to make it. Product is bad, hate the team that let Jobs down, because we know he's only ever involved in the good stuff.

Amazon is still selling the physical version. Why would they pull the digital download and not the physical copy? Is it because there are different people responsible for it?

By the time you receive a boxed copy the servers may be fixed.

I thought it might be an automatic block based on 1-star reviews, but both products have the same 88% 1-star reviews right now.

Digital: 765/866 = 88.3%

DVD: 912/1038 = 87.9%

If there's an automatic block, it's more likely to be related to refund requests.

Is there a way to filter Amazon reviews by Verified Purchase? I'd love to see these stats with only people that we know have bought the game.

I'm just curious of a way to eliminate all the people who made up their mind before the game even came out.

It's entirely possible that Amazon have just run out of keys for the digital version...

From what I've read, EA is directly refunding customers of physical disks -- I guess they're forced by some law or another. No such luck for digital downloads: EA is refusing all refunds for them. Amazon dipped into their pockets for a while, returning money to disgruntled customers and taking a hit for EA, but clearly it was getting too much.

The box-art says, "Winner of 26 PC Game awards". Is that for the series or for Sim City V? I have a hard time believing its the latter.

Probably for the entire series but it's still false marketing.

It's for the entire series. The wiki pages states it has only won "8 awards out of 24 nominations".

Overall, this games seems like a good example of how not to launch a product:

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/simcity

Fanboy perspective: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we...

Seriously, how is this legal? They're obviously very open about it requiring online, and the extent to which the servers are involved, and the fact you need Origin.

However, this isn't some cheap game, some small company, some inexperienced producers who didn't know what to expect. That their servers aren't up to the job is inexcusable, and clearly their fault.

Even if Origin has Ts & Cs that boil down to you don't actually have the right to play games you buy, even if you buy them on a disc - which I'm sure they do, how is this possibly legal? The game is unplayable, it's their fault and they could have made it work if they'd chosen to.

It would depend on your local consumer laws. Under UK law, for example, Simcity would not currently be considered 'fit for purpose' and they're clearly obliged to give you a refund:

http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/nireland/consumer_ni/consumer_...

...assuming you're buying it from a UK(/EU?) subsidiary.

Local laws will vary. IANAL.

From my experience with the NCAA Football line, they just don't seem to care. People have been complaining for years that that game crashes or hangs frequently and has a number of gameplay bugs, and they haven't been fixed anything.

SimCity and SimCity 2000 were such great games, it's a bit disappointing to see how EA screwed up the rest of the series.

The only thing bad about SimCity 4 was the performance was less than stellar. Other than that, 3000 and 4 were just as good as 2000.

A decent size SC4 city can bring today's hardware to its knees, and the game is 10 years old.

It would be more accurate to say that SC4 is not optimized for today's hardware. It relies entirely on single-threaded performance, which has not improved appreciably since the days when it was released. Furthermore, it is 32-bit and not large address aware, which means it is limited to about 1.5GB of memory. Needless to say, this would max out a Pentium 4 single-core system with 2GB of RAM circa mid-2000s, but it will leave your (not too) modern 4-core desktop with 8GB of RAM sitting mostly idle with lots of free memory. The game may run slow with large cities, but that's because it doesn't know how to take advantage of modern tech, not because that modern tech is being pushed to its limits.

I guess it's personal preference. For me, the new stuff in 3K didn't make it more fun, it just made it more work to get a city going. It could be I didn't put in the time to understand the new stuff, though.

Still ARE great games. And DRM free. And, in the case of the original, open-source :D

Micropolis (Simcity): http://code.google.com/p/micropolis/

SimCity 2000: http://www.gog.com/gamecard/simcity_2000_special_edition

Three things

1) remove the online DRM 2) significantly expand the size of the ridiculously small city area (let users push the bounds of their system by choosing how big of a city to work on) 3) enable a save/load to go with the offline mode

Do it as fast as possible. And then suck up to users by providing some free DLC here and there.

Anyone taking bets that EA will do the opposite of these obvious steps?

I wish I had read about this before I bought the game. I feel screwed over, I would have never bought the game if I knew it was like this.

There's something the game industry doesn't get in their zeal for control over users. (And lets be clear, this is about control, not just about piracy.) Here's what the game industry doesn't get: your barrier to entry is already exceptionally high. You might be able to get away with this in the short term, but it's a bad long term proposition, because I'm almost always going to choose convenience over quality (and I'm not alone). Asking me to pay $60, wait for a 12GB download, and have a very powerful rig is already a huge stretch. When you factor this mess in it's just not worth my time. I'd rather go get an indie game, or play a flash game. It's just not worth my time to deal with this, even if the game itself is impressive.

Not too late for a refund

Side note, it's a little odd that the additional images for a video game are all concept art.

I can only speculate the designers said "Oh man, if we can interact with each other's city that'd be awesome" and someone higher up said "It'll always be on!"

Everyone saw this coming. Everyone. I don't understand how they couldn't prepare better?

Because EA doesn't care about their customers that much. There's no reason on doubling your launch fleet for a few days when it will hardly effect the sales of your game. Save money and let customers bitch for a few days, just more free press about your game.

After the Tetris debacle[1] on iOS and putting obtrusive adverts into their iOS games for new ones despite me paying for them (a cardinal sin IMHO) combined with endless DRM debacles and horror stories about how employees were treated, I took the decision to never buy or install another EA game again.

Electronic Arts (which EA is the mutated-gollum-like growth of) was actually a software developer that was based on the idea of the developers being artists. They shared lavish profits with them, put the developers' faces on boxes and made some amazing games. If you want to see some highlights of Electronic Arts' back catalogue, take a look at these:

* M.U.L.E - http://www.worldofmule.net/tiki-index.php

* Desert Strike - http://www.mobygames.com/game/desert-strike-return-to-the-gu...

* Populous - http://www.mobygames.com/game/populous

* The Bard's Tale - http://bardstale.poverellomedia.com/

* F/A-18 Interceptor - http://www.mobygames.com/game/fa-18-interceptor

* Indy 500 - http://www.mobygames.com/game/indianapolis-500-the-simulatio...

* Road Rash - http://www.mobygames.com/game/road-rash

A lot (but not all) of these were games developed when Trip Hawkins was in charge. Trip Hawkins went on to found the failed 3DO console, which is where a lot of the modern 3D versions of the popular franchises (NFS, FIFA etc.) first started out.

If you don't like DRM, being nickel and dimed, or scummy company practices. I highly recommend you boycott EA and spend your money on the plenty of City building alternatives on Steam[2] instead.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_(mobile_video_game)#App_...

[2] - http://store.steampowered.com/

The servers being down, I can almost forgive, but this whole affair with the DRM is very puzzling. EA has a history of angering users who buy their games. And yet, for apparently no good reason, they have incorporated into their latest offering the one element that is guaranteed to anger virtually everyone who buys their game.

It's pretty simple - I paid money for your game. Now, I own it. EA, maybe you need a tutorial on how money works. Let's not get side-tracked and start talking about whether or not I own my songs on iTunes or any of these more entrenched markets. If I buy a video game, I should be able to play it 10 years later, even if the EA Sim City Servers are long-gone and now devoted to keeping track of whatever the latest terrible incarnation of Madden does.

I didn't buy Civ V (not EA) because of DRM. I haven't bought other games because of DRM. I wanted to buy into the Sim City franchise again but I'm not buying Sim City V because of DRM. You just lost a sale and likely a future customer.

It's been fun while I've actually been able to connect to EA's servers. (which is rare). I'm not going to beat the anti-drm drum, but I will say this. If EA is going to go this route they had better have the resources available to make it happen. I for one actually don't mind it, if it was able to work.

This is all an assumption but:

With the amount of stuff that gets simulated on their servers, the sim city servers are probably more resource intensive than even really popular FPS servers.

That means they're also more expensive per person than most other game servers.

What happens when it's no longer profitable for EA to keep them running? I doubt they'll release the source code.

I'm not sure if this will work but there's a petition for EA to remove the server requirement... http://www.change.org/petitions/electronic-arts-inc-remove-a...

I am waiting to see what comes of this before I buy. However, They had overloaded server issues during the 1 hour beta AND the extended 4 hour beta leading up to the launch.

Hoping they can get this resolved quickly. I think we're dreaming if the fix will involve a non-DRM offline mode.

I haven't been paying much attention to SCV except that it seemed to be generating a lot of hype and excitement...so I'm kind of confused why the game has to be so intricately tied into whatever (apparently faulty) online service that EA has setup.

I mean, besides the DRM. I don't get why my fake city has to be attached to a world of fake cities if all I want to do is play in the sandbox. Didn't the designers/executives consider that many people would be perfectly fine playing alone? And then slowly rolling out the multiplayer features?

I doubt we'll see it, but it'd be great to see a post-mortem of the actual bug. Was it load-related or just something extremely boneheaded?

"I mean, besides the DRM."

But that's the core issue, really.

No, the core issue is: the game doesn't work. Lets face it, gamers would still be buying the game with DRM if it didn't crash.

If what you mean is: "Crashing (to the point of unplayability) is an inherent consequence of DRM"...the many wildly successful games that have DRM would indicate otherwise

I didn't mean any of that. I meant that DRM is the reason one would implement constant-onlineness into a game that should also (mostly, even) work as a single player game. My apologies if my use of the word 'issue' suggested something different.

I really, really wanted to buy this game. Since I was young I've always loved the SimCity series and was hoping this would be great... I was even going to buy a new PC just to play it.

Fuck you EA - you're disappointing my inner child!

Most single-player games that have an multi-player or online component also have an offline mode for single-player use.

This game should have been a combination of a basic single-player mode (campaign style, maybe with goals to accomplish, etc) in addition to a multi-player mode that would allow for online play with other cities.

At least with a single-player mode you know there is a part of the game you'll always be able to play, long after the online components have been discontinued.

Conceptually, the online mode sounds pretty intriguing but, obviously, was poorly executed.

SimCity 2000/3000/4 still work perfectly, and are available for free.

Since when are they available for free?

And where?

I think SimCity 2000 was considered abandonware, or was it only the first SimCity game? I'm not really sure about it. But the first 4 games are definitely playable without any internet connection whatsoever.

According to Wikipedia, original SimCity is available on Wii (virtual console) and iOS, and 2000 is still available on PSN. Hardly abandoned. And playable without an internet connection is far from "available for free".

Available for free in practical terms vs available for free in legal terms..

Abandonware isn't actually a legal concept so whether it's considered abandonware would be up to the person you ask, I guess.

Not free, but I saw SimCity 4 for sale on Steam for a small sum of about £3.99 the other week. I nearly bought it, if only to end the requirement to have the CD in to play it!

Looks like SimCity 2000 is definitely still being sold.

http://www.gog.com/gamecard/simcity_2000_special_edition

The programmers will probably be thrown under the bus for this instead of the suits who dictated the game's stupid social direction and always-on DRM, but I'm glad that this game is so far looking like an epic failure. Gaming companies need to be punished in the marketplace for rampant stupidity.

They deserve this game to flop, and it's good for gaming as a whole if this is an epic failure so EA will learn a lesson.

(Though I have doubts that a company as thick-headed as EA will learn anything positive from this)

My copy is on its way in the mail. I'm a huge SimCity fanatic and was slightly worried that when it got here I'd sink too much time in it and get behind on my work.

Thanks EA!

NO Longer Valid - Amazon smartened up (in terms of running a profit making business) and decided to resell the game, its the number 1 seller now after all

Well, that's what you get for buying a DRMed game.

Stand for your rights.

Looks like it's available now - any confirmation that they stopped selling it over 'game issues', or if that was just conjecture to get more clicks?

Here's a thought: if you can't get your act together with servers during a launch, stagger the launch. IE, when you buy your game, you have a place in a queue, and when there is enough server capacity to support you, you are let into the system. That way, you can change gamers expectations such that they are being let into an exclusive party, not that the game that they purchased is defective.

And this is why I basically do not pre order anything. If I do, its pretty much considered charity in my mind (eg a kickstart -esque situation)

But they promised...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLYLmsEBGug

To me, the problems we see today will pale in comparison with the problems people will experience years from now. If the game is unplayable today, what will it be like when EA decides that keeping the servers running is unprofitable, and turns those servers off?

(I think there's some sort of analog to historical preservation of art and buildings here.)

I have played the last couple nights (since release) on the West Europe 2 server though I'm on the East Coast. Not ideal I guess but I've had to do the same thing for other games. Hopefully it still works when I get home in a few hours :)

Speaking of "broken" memes.

I used to play SimCity like you, until it got an arrow in the cloud. Improve on that please.

Reading the comments below it sounds like there is an infrastructure scaling issue going on down at EA (I'm no DRM specialist).

If that is indeed the case: Methinks the AWS sales guy/gal on the EA account has just been handed the easiest ROI they could ask for. "Buy my cloud, and we will be able to start selling your game again."

Unfortunately the way this often goes is that someone who was responsible for not using AWS correctly blames AWS instead of himself and EA stops using them, or using them for future games.

Although that won't tend to work if EA is already using AWS a lot.

Nitpicking: The name of the game is just "Sim City". They dropped the numbering scheme and went for a total reboot.

> The name of the game is just "Sim City"

No, it's not. If you're going to nitpick, get it right. The name of the game is SimCity.

If you're going to slam his comment, at least offer a reason why it's incorrect

The Amazon link lists it as "SimCity".

The title is 'SimCity', all as one word.

To be fair, the box art says SimCity with no "V". The promotional materials on the EA site says SimCity with no "V". If it actually is named SimCity V then it's easy to understand the confusion.

Although I wouldn't call it a reboot necessarily since every version is more or less a reboot, so to speak.

It's actually the sixth SimCity game, not the fifth. The fifth game was SimCity Societies. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity#Personal_computer_versi....

Ah, I had forgotten about that one.

No one likes thinking about Societies as a SimCity game ;)

Societies was not made by Maxis which is why I discount it as a SimCity game.

From what I can tell, OP appears to be correct in saying this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_(2013_video_game)

>SimCity is ... a reboot of the SimCity series.

I was thinking of buying this, but meh, never mind.

(may as well just wait for the cracked version and enjoy the game with more convenience)

http://www.reddit.com/r/simcity seems to be summing up the problem pretty nicely with some clever use of the curved roads.

I have been amazed at the interest level in this game. I shared in the excitement and could not wait for the Mac version. Now the bad backlash, bugs, and generally horrific reviews have significantly deflated my interest. Gaming startups - make a better one!! ;)

like this http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1584821767/civitas-plan-...

Its sad they didn't use the playfish devops team that flawlessly launched simcity social.

Looks like Amazon sells it again.

Short of asking for a refund, and not buying the game in the first place, who at Maxis and EA can customers write/call/etc to let them know what I feel about the business decision to force online only DRM?

The shareholders.

http://investors.morningstar.com/ownership/shareholders-majo...

Short their stock.

I still see "buy and download" button and it says "Available". It has a warning about connectivity problems but the game seems to be still available for sale.

Not really game issues (though they definitely seem to exist as well, unstable games is just par for the course these days), broken DRM and server issues.

I wonder if this is just a way to get around all of those horrible reviews. They'll probably put it up again soon with cleared reviews.

So did they not even bother to look at the debacle of a launch that was _Cities XL_? Or did they imagine themselves immune?

EA has a very long history of anti consumer practices. Pretty much everyone expected some kind of fubar on launch but even this level of incompetence surprised most jaded gamers.

They sold server-side processing as a "feature" for what should otherwise be a single-player game. Did anyone not see this coming when it was last discussed on HN?

I remember thinking that the servers were guaranteed to melt on launch day.

Interesting. I guess one person didn't see this coming.

I can't understand why experienced gamers would buy it at launch if they expect there to be serious technical issues.

Yeah, it's not even the screw-the-consumer DRM part: I expected that a competent product manager would have said "Hey, our competitors built a city-sim game that was supposed to incorporate a significant online gameplay element, and it didn't go so well for them. What can we learn from this and how can we avoid it?"

So either they didn't ask the question, or they didn't answer it well, or they didn't bother avoiding the problems after they learned it, or they managed to flub it anyway. I'd be curious to know which dysfunction they suffered from.

EA for the most part does not respect the player experience.

How is it 2013 and NFL 2K5 is still the best NFL sim?

It would be hilarious if a cracked version allowing offline play would appear on TPB :)

When torrenting your game offers a better user experience than paying for it, well...

Looks like it's available again

Oh dear, looks like the virtual rioters have broken out into the real world.

dwarf fortress is the new simcity.

The brain-dead corporate douches in gray suits pulled the trendy social bullshit into the legendary single-player game and ruined it. That's unbelievable!

I think the real reason Amazon stopped selling it was the Amazon Buyers looked at the game and said: "What? No subways? Small City Size? We can't sell this!"

Wow, Upwards of 800 amazingly dumb people on the review page. Didn't they see the first 100 reviews <i>before</i> making the purchase?

Perhaps they bought in advance?

Thats even worse

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