EA Apologizes For SimCity Disaster, Says It Was “Dumb”..
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> Some people are still experiencing response and stability problems that we’re working fast to address.
We have redefined the word fast.
> The consensus among critics and players is that this is fundamentally a great game.
I know you'll play it, no matter how terrible your experience is.
> But this game is made to be played online.
This game is DRMed.
(And etched beneath in faint pencil:)
I expect that EA will focus on online games from now on. If you want offline games, you'll have to rely on Minesweeper.
> We’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio.
DRMs ensure that you don't play a game for free. Since DRMs failed to work this time, you get to play a game for free. Like Bill said, "As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours."
Except for Mac users. We couldn't care less if we tried.
> SimCity is a GREAT game and the people who made it are incredibly proud.
Understandably, they're mad at us. We had ONE JOB and we failed to make the log-in scale.
>We have redefined the word fast.
Sometimes I am really surprised by the responses to companies here. It seems like people never had a job or forgot the experience. Companies are not abstract entities that make things happen and only do PR: people work there.
A large portion of HN is likely engineers of some sort or someone very close to them and yet you don't believe EA's engineers are scrambling, maybe pulling all nighters to fix this. All you see is PR being slow to respond. PR are not the ones working fast to fix the issue.
(I don't work at EA and I don't know anyone who does, I don't even play games)
[edit] "It should be relatively easy" might be more accurate. It would not be good engineering to create a single-player mode that doesn't degrade gracefully when the network connection is absent.
This is another statement that always surprises me when said by an engineer instead of an exec.
They want to minimise their losses to piracy before China and India become really big markets. They are willing to destroy the companies for this opportunity.
The DRM issue was already visible and caused issues during the beta. EA was notified. The game creators were aware of it. They might even have asked the executives to allow them to fix it the obvious way [1].
You'd at least expect them to make sure this known issue would be easy to fix fast.
The most awesome part is that EA is making a lot of money on this disaster. DRMs are a very profitable absurdity. I am quite sure that execs slept well, and that EA engineers did pull an all-nighter.
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/03/08/ea-employe...
[1]
> The good news is that SimCity is a solid hit in
> all major markets
I do see how my peers are "enjoying" this, which is why I'm staying far, far away.
Have EA made any promises regarding the expected life of this game?
I still play the original SimCities from time to time. It's sad to think that modern games might not be around in a decade or two for us to enjoy - even if just for reminiscing.
> This is definitely an "unmitigated disaster". What nobody's seemed to realize about EA's offer to give away a free Origin game is this: EA can write off the games they give away in dealing with this debacle as a tax write-off at full "market" value (on the Origin market, anyhow) even though they cost only pennies to deliver to you. In addition, the $20 coupon for another Origin game that was given to those who bought the game through Origin will also be used as a write-off against the $50+ the game went against. If we assume that the value of the games that they will offer for their "apology" will be around $35-40, then they will have effectively written off the entire purchase price of SimCity in "promotional" and "apology" give-aways, thus turning the aforementioned "unmitigated disaster" into EA's most profitable quarter ever. This is not just consumer fraud, it's tax evasion.
Oddly enough, according to EA's financial statements their income after tax has been higher than their income before tax for at least the past four years. Not sure how that works, perhaps tax rebates or writing off losses?
ALL simulation is done on the client, EXCEPT for interactions with neighboring cities when they are run by human players. But in the single player mode even that is not an issue. The only thing the servers are needed for is persisting (saving) game state and that's the end of it. People have been able to play the game without internet connection for hours on end before their game crashed, clearly proving that the game DOES NOT rely on the cloud for simulation.
Besides, an average gaming computer with Core i5 and 4 gigs of RAM is far more powerful than some virtualized EC2 instance with limited and shared CPU/memory. Offloading computation/simulation to the cloud for "performance reasons" is a ridiculous notion.
This is about DRM and everyone knows it.
And you conclude from that that the game does not need the servers (explicit DRM or not)?
The game depends on the servers, either for DRM or for game saves. But when they are off-line, it doesn't matter the true reason for game crash.
The fact is - the game needs the servers being ON.
Other than that though, your explanation makes the most sense.
Saved games and inter-city communication is done against the game clock, not the wall clock, so they could reduce server load (on the only two things servers were doing, saving games and providing intercity communication when multiple people were on in the same region) by disabling the fastest speed of game time.
A proportional response would be to allow users to refund the game, since this is a quality issue and is clearly out of the players' control; and to rapidly expand their server capacity until they have enough for everyone.
(I'm not an advocate for DRM, just proportionality.)
> Of course it's to do with [DRM]. If it [was a single player game], there would be no issues at all.
The two are unrelated. If it was a single player game we wouldn't be having these issues... because it wouldn't need server capacity to play, which is nothing to do with DRM. It could still have always-on DRM.
Perhaps. I had be interested in your sources for this fact though. Otherwise it feels like opinion being stated as fact.
Well, if the players still had to be connected to the servers (always-on) to play, maybe the same problems would arise even though the players wouldn't be interacting.
The strange aspect of this is that their infrastructure seems to be static. In this modern age of cloud computing, why not make the number of game servers elastic? That would bring safety to them and savings by reducing the number of idling servers when demand is low.
More saliently, it happened with the launch of Cities XL... which did more or less exactly the same things in the cloud that this new SimCity is trying to do.
It's DRM.
The game is intended to be played online. You share resources with neighbouring cities. Crime spills over into your city from others. You can work together on collaborative projects (international airports etc.). It's not MMO but it's not single player either.
I believe in some early interviews Maxis also referred to some computational work being offloaded to EA servers but I can't find these now. They might not have gone through with it, but it was certainly in the original plan.
There really is nothing to say in their defense, even if they DID design the game to be multiplayer, they could of done it in a decentralized way and let peers inter-connect. They did it this way for control. Do not defend them.
And if you're really convinced the online requirement is just glorified DRM and EA is evil anyway, don't buy the game. Problem solved! There are really more important things to worry about.
It's really depressing but that's how it is, and if you think otherwise then you're deluded.
It seems unlikely and would be a huge development investment, but the best thing for EA & their shareholders is to do a 180 and change the game to single-player w/o DRM.
I wonder if the engineers have prepared ahead of time for a DRM-less version (knowing of the potential for the fiasco).