Comment by espadrine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by espadrine | Hacker News Reader

I love PR-speak.

> 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.

My favourite part was this:

    > The good news is that SimCity is a solid hit in
    > all major markets

In other words, "Don't worry guys, I know this looks bad right now, but we're making plenty of money so it's okay". Gotta put something in there to reassure the investors, I guess?

"You may have misgivings about buying this game, but see how all of your peers are enjoying this; don't you want to be cool like them?"

>see how all of your peers are enjoying this

I do see how my peers are "enjoying" this, which is why I'm staying far, far away.

>> Some people are still experiencing response and stability problems that we’re working fast to address.

>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)

It should be trivial to make a patch with an offline mode, if they've followed good network programming practice.

[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.

> It should be trivial

This is another statement that always surprises me when said by an engineer instead of an exec.

In both cases it is a statement made by someone who doesn't understand what they are talking about. (EDIT) to avoid being needlessly trite: because if someone does know what they are talking about then they would say it is trivial. "It should be trivial" means you are just making stuff up.

Yes, but the people whose decisions lead to IT people pulling all nighters are not themselves pulling all nighters or even bothering to tell the PR people what to say for 48 hours.

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.

I meant it the following way.

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...

EA Labels president Frank Gibeau has bassically stated that they won't make games that aren't in some way multiplayer[1]. This doesn't strictly mean that they won't make a game without a single-player part that doesn't require a connection, but it's pretty close.

[1]

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