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Comment by estel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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