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Comment by cbs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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