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> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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