Things were clearly working when it was in beta.
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.
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.
Of course for all we know Sim City will turn out to have that kind if BS too.
that poor game's so predestined to be a blatant cash whore, almost makes you feel bad for it
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.
Digital Restrictions Management = Defective by Design.
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.
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.
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.
The problem with EA then isn't DRM but badly implemented DRM.
* 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.
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.
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'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 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.
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.
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?
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.