That would be so wonderful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You must have missed this. A Steve Jobs classic. Music industry execs have confirmed Apple was behind the move away from DRM.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
hack into their servers, steal binaries of game server, modify client to work with local server.
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)
In college I pirated games quite a bit. I never bought one, nor would I have.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
It's safe to assume EA uses purchases as their success metric, as they are unlikely to complain you actually paid for the game.
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?
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.
Additionally, BF3 had an offline single-player mode. SimCity could have an offline single-player mode, but elected not to.
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 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.
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.
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)
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.