SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

You aren't going to pirate Sim City 5.

This is the future of gaming. Companies are just going to avoid all the grief of piracy and weird DRM by either moving to locked-down platforms (iOS and consoles) or into games that have essential online components.

It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. I'd love to by a game and install it on my PC without it taking things over, and the publishers would love to write that and not worry about DRM. But we can't get that because each of us doesn't trust the other party to defect.

It's not just unlikely but, in fact, impossible for the operating costs of the servers to be worth keeping on forever since no (significant) additional income will be coming in from the title after some point X.

SaaS companies have been dealing with this for years quite successfully via their "pay as you go" monthly subscriptions. This keeps the money flowing in and motivation to keep the servers on. And, better yet, it gives the consumer confidence that the service provider is going to pay attention to the product long-term, not just during launch day.

My recommendation for EA moving forward would be to move to subscription pricing for any games that operate as online-only - single- or multi-player.

Exact pricing is important as well. My initial instinct was to say that they should prorate the cost, something like $5/month but I quickly realized why this wouldn't work. Obviously most gamers are fickle and have short attention spans. 90% of buyers probably wouldn't buy month two and it wouldn't work out.

Instead, I would recommend pricing the game at something like $60 for two years. Same price and clearer value to me as a customer. Suddenly I'm not worried if they are going to shut off the servers in four years because that's not what I'm paying for today (and really never was). I'm paying for the opportunity to play this week and, if I love it, play it over and over again for two full years. Is that worth $60? Absolutely! And what about in two years? If I'm still loving it, hopefully they let me renew for another two years, maybe even at a discount. And if the game ends up sucking and nobody renews, they can turn the servers off (or throttle them down) without feeling bad.

The real risk with the current system isn't in case the game is a flop and they turn the servers off prematurely. It's actually if the game is legendary, like SimCities of past, and the passion to play keeps momentum for decades. How can EA keep the lights on?

I don't know why a game publisher wouldn't want to sell new copies of old games forever, like you can do with movies in the good new days.

Indeed. And there's also the fact that MMO are — for the most part — "long term" experiences. Now single-player games can be as well, but for the most part are not, the majority of Diablo III buyers have probably moved on already to some other games, where a WoW player will be in it for years, so the rough few first weeks aren't much of an issue.

Try telling FPS players that their game will be unavailable every Tuesday morning for 6-12 hours and they'll probably riot -- that's standard downtime in the MMO world though.

When an MMO talks to a server. it's in the user's best interest. When SimCity tries to talk to a server, it's against the user's best interest, who might want to play in a place without an internet connection, but is prevented to do so by a system that does nothing for him or her to begin with. It's weird that this is not obvious.

Players are losing save games, either getting reverted or forced to start from scratch.

  I wouldn't be too terribly shocked if people just sucked it 
  up and bought it anyway as long as the servers are stable.

(The above is anecdotal at best, but my gut feeling is that this will hurt EA in more than the very short term. See also: Blizzard with Diablo 3.)

In another discussion on hn, someone was basically saying "no one acts so surprised when you can't access Facebook if your internet connection is down, why are they so ticked off here?" I'd argue that it's because most people have a reasonable expectation that a locally-installed, single-player game should work regardless of connectivity.

There may be potentially valid technical reasons why SimCity might need or even want a persistent connection, but you absolutely need to call that out.

With EA's record of shutting down still-active servers for the multi-player portions of games that were just a few years old, I would be very reticent to buy an EA product that required a server even for single-player mode.

The game was never meant to be a sequel. That's why it's calls SimCity and not SimCity 5. People just decide to interpret it as such even if its not.

1) release it as sim city online, with marketing emphasizing it's like a sim city mmo. People will be more tolerant of launch network issues. Make lots of $$$

2) later release single player sim city 5 (just rip out online parts from above) make more $$$

Such an inept company.

You play your game, and if you want to do something social and the servers are down -- it sucks, but you can still play, and take part in the social stuff when it is up and working.

For online saves -- there is a local backup for when the online system is down.

These are not difficult things. They are just trying to fight an ever-losing battle against piracy.

doesn't Steam also have DRM?

While I agree with you in principle – I doubt I play more than one or two games a year – I resent your sanctimonious tone.

You've no way of knowing how people are using their games. Modern games present a lot of opportunities for exploring power and morality. Even sexuality. For some, the escapism represented by games may be as close to vacation or therapy as economic reality allows. For others, they're a vacuous waste of time that could be better spent.

But you don't know, so don't claim to.

She credited three video games with building her most impressive skills: Descent taught her to visualize and maneuver in 3D space, Starcraft taught her to think about force composition and disposition, and Nethack taught her to make thousands of decisions (and type thousands of characters) without making mistakes.

She still games pretty extensively (she'll be taking Tuesday off for the SC2 expansion), and has a great job and family. And at least part of her excellence is due to the way she uses video games to sharpen her mind.

Giving up video games, for me, likely would have meant I was working a menial job for low pay. Games are a huge part of life for a lot of people and it's totally possible to engage with them meaningfully, often and still have it be healthy.

Give it up people, trolling the Internet = fast-forwarding your life.

Except, in addition to being pleasurable, media shapes our society and culture. That we do more than just working to survive is perhaps one of humanity's defining features, and we should be embracing it. Video games are similar to books or film, in that they have dramatically influenced many of our minds and lives. That's why we get upset when publishers see our obsession and game merely as something to exploit for profit, then throw away, rather than as something that should be preserved as part of society's collective knowledge. Even if the DRM probably won't directly cause us any problems ever, it makes us uncomfortable. I noticed when playing the latest release of Metal Gear Solid, how significant the series has been to me.

When I played MG/MGS1, I was young - and, among other games, shared controller gameplay was a bonding experience between me and my friends. These friends are still my strongest, so no doubt it helped cement the friendship. MGS2 was when I was about 10, and starting to think somewhat philosophically. The ideas about AI and censorship, trans-humanism, robotics and nanotechnology significantly changed me and perhaps shaped my beliefs and future (in combination with films like The Matrix which I watched at the same time). MGS3, I played with my girlfriend when we first met - and even now we still talk about it, and have played it a few times since. I played MGS4 relatively recently, now moved out, living with girlfriend and working. That video game series, however, has been there, influencing my life in various ways from the sidelines - and that's just one video game out of hundreds I've played over the years. I remember when playing Sega Megadrive games when I was very young, trying to work out how they were made. It perhaps is when I started to get interested in programming.

Sure, you shouldn't be playing them all day every day - but that's just the age old problem of procrastination, living a balanced life and work before play. If you go too far down this path of maximum productivity, you start to burn out. Finding the play/work balance is hard, because on the one side is extreme sloth, and on the other is a path that, I believe, ends up making you a kind of solipsist/nihilist burnout.

...

Then I got in. And got booted from the tutorial because I couldn't visit another city due to the servers.

Color me unimpressed.

But, region management is server side.

So basically, if one manages to skip log in and makes save-s local then one can play single city offline.

This is as much information as I have at the moment.

http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-Limited-Edition-Pc/product-rev...

Guess we'll all find out in a few days...

This seems to me a bold claim to make. Diablo III's launch was, in many ways, a huge new service for them, a new infrastructure to test and maintain, and they were quick to fix issues with it. Compare this to the launch of The Burning Crusade expansion pack -- it was a rough launch! -- but over time, they managed to smooth their systems out such that now, even a content launch as huge as Mists of Pandaria went smoothly.

WoW is a different game, but it illustrates their iterative healing process. Since the Wings of Liberty launch went smoothly, I wouldn't expect anything less of Heart of the Swarm, as it's being released on a system that's here, ready, polished, and tested. We might see a few hiccups, but nothing close to Diablo III.

I'd hardly call Battle.net an infrastructure that Blizzard is "just not competent to build or manage."

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/19169-diablo-3-launch-marred-b...

Reddit's /r/gaming was filled with Diablo launch problems.

Basically, it's hard to get it downloaded and installed.

If you do that, it's very difficult to login to play.

If you manage that, it's very difficult to do the tutorial or claim a city or load your city.

If you manage that, it's very difficult to play the game without experiencing disconnects or server-related dysfunction that directly affects gameplay.

Basically, it's nothing like the experience they wanted to deliver.

The uproar is because the online requirement isn't inherently necessary to the gameplay (although EA has done their best to add some multiplayer aspects). It's primarily a business decision intending to make it more difficult to pirate or buy the game used.

I think Assassin's Creed 2 has been down to $6 a couple times on Steam sales, but I'm not quite willing to put down even one extra dollar. Oh well, their loss. Meanwhile, I've spent a couple hundred dollars on Kickstarter games in the recent past, all of which promised a DRM free option.

I don't expect more game companies to stay away from this; I expect them to do this a lot more for PC gaming. Probably not explicitly, but as much as people in /r/technology insists piracy doesn't matter, the companies continue to care. With online games, the need to worry about that largely evaporates.

Instead, I expect companies to put in proper rate limiting, fallbacks, and plan for the ability to spin up extra servers in case of high demand.

Doubtful.

In this case, it appears the server has been down for a significant number of players. Therefore, many people can't play... even if everything is fine on your end.

Things get worse however. According to one of the links, EA's servers seem to have a corruption issue as well: http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2013/03/BEvZ...

If you can't trust that your city will be there tomorrow due to EA's shoddy servers, then there is very little incentive to even play the game. I guess it might happen with a local save as well... but local saves of a game seems like an easier problem to solve.