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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I stopped reading right here:

"Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period."

He's flat out lying. I have no interest whatsoever in what he is saying. SimCity can technically run offline, gamers want to run it offline, but EA won't let you run it offline because you could then pirate their software. They should just demonstrate some courage and admit it.

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Lying - maybe not. It sure works like a DRM scheme. But EAs position to this has always been "we did it for the social interactions, and to make simCity possible by computing things on our servers!" (sure, that last part was a lie). SimCity can run offline, but it's hard to argue about motivation. Maybe one should give him that point.

In the same spirit - here the sentence he wrote which offended me the most:

> The complaints against us last year were our support of SOPA (not true), and that they didn’t like the ending to Mass Effect 3.

The complaints against the ending of Mass Effect 3 reach far deeper than "not liking". The ending broke every promise and every announcement made about it prior and it lead to the feeling that every decision made in the whole trilogy was meaningless, because no decision had any effect in the ending at all, neither in the result nor in the fight before(!). That is not "not liking", that broke hundreds of thousands of gamer-hearts and still hurts.

To start a PR-fluff-piece with a misleading on such an emotional topic doesn't seem very smart to me.

> SimCity can technically run offline,

Verifiable fact.

> gamers want to run it offline, but

Verifiable fact.

> EA won't let you run it offline

Verifiable fact.

> because you could then pirate their software.

Whoa, unsubstantiated conclusion there.

I think we don't actually know their motivations. For example, it could be as simple as they want to be able to sell stuff in-game, wanted to save development time by eliminating another configuration to test, push software upgrades and bugfixes, monitor your play time, resist cheaters, or eventually leverage players into an online social network. It could also be an anti-piracy DRM measure too of course.

And even if he's not - he should concede this point. There's no winning for EA if they continue to argue this, consumers have already made up their mind about it. They should cut their losses and own up to the SimCity debacle.

I suspect the argument is more "It's not DRM, it's amazing social interaction, that benefits everyone!" (read: Nobody would use it if it was optional)

I think I believe them: the game they wanted to make was one where the "continuous, integrated online world" was integral to the way people played SimCity: only the final product didn't do enough to justify their original intention.

But it is not a question about "belief" (unless you extrapolate that to mean future actions). SimCity has been hacked to demonstrate its completely offline nature.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21802508

I've no doubt that it can run like that (and given SimCity works for ~30 mins or so without connecting to SimCity's servers, it's no shock to anybody who actually played the game at launch); but that doesn't mean that their intent when conceiving of the game wasn't for the online aspect to be utterly central and integral to how they wanted people to play the game. The always online "requirement" could absolutely have resulted from that desire rather than DRM.

If it was just a matter of DRM, then it's plain inconsistent with how they're approaching DRM with every other PC release they've done recently.

It's such a ridiculous, transparent lie too. Their mythical "intentions" mean nothing when the effect is identical to DRM.

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