Comments on: SimCity DRM disaster: EA removes game features "to get servers working"

By: elix

elix — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:31:00 +0000

The other thread's locked to comments, so I have to continue the conversation here. So, yeah, about Maxis and EA's claim that a significant portion of GlassBox's processing is offloaded onto the cloud: Apparently total horseshit, according to a confirmed Maxis developer that requested anonymity for obvious reasons.

By: l337n00b

l337n00b — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:24:00 +0000

I think SC deserves to be considered differently because the people who really play that game are playing it against other people online. Perhaps there should be support for LAN parties, but I haven’t heard of those in quite a while (maybe just because I’m not in university anymore, I’ll admit). I loved the SC2 campaign and would probably be a little happier to be able to play HotS offline, but I’m going to buy it and I’m willing to understand the always online component.

For Diablo 3, I think the main problem was the developers having no idea what made Diablo or Diablo 2 fun, and sucking all the fun out they could in the name of some fantasy of “balance.” The always online thing would be a lot more of a problem if the game was something you’d really miss if you couldn’t play.

By: l337n00b

l337n00b — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:19:00 +0000

I’m pretty sure by deciding not to buy the game you just stole $60 from them. Better watch out for a civil suit.

By: l337n00b

l337n00b — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:07:00 +0000

Robert Drop: In the long term these things aren’t going to work out for game makers. People buy the box the day it comes out so how good the game is doesn’t affect sales of that game, but it may affect sales of the next one. Of course the executives get paid on some nonsense like change in change in change in profit this week, so of course they are making bad long term decision.

By: First Last

First Last — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:39:00 +0000

So basically your solution is to reinvent the wheel by using flash drives instead of CDs and expect that they won’t come with exactly the same piracy issues as CDs?
The stupidest thing is that almost every single CD game I bought I ended up cracking just so that I didn’t have to reinsert the CD to play it! Because fucking around with hardware to use software is fucking primitive and a waste of my time!

I have a better solution: goddamn code-wheels.

This form of always-online DRM is actually much more effective at stopping piracy than you think because there is no ‘code’ to copy down – it simply binds that game to your user account, and when EA gets a returned disk “because it doesn’t work” and yet see that user account online playing they just deactivate that illegitimate copy. And you can’t just crack it not to go online because the servers aren’t simply there checking copies to make sure they are legitimate – they’re actually serving up functional game code without which the game cannot function correctly (if at all). Pirating the game isn’t just a case of bypassing the checks, but in fact completely and accurately emulating an official server without having access to the code it’s executing for you.

By: Robert Drop

Robert Drop — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 19:05:00 +0000

I didn’t say popular indie games were rare. I said that indie games of the sort that you listed, i.e. the ones that hit anywhere near AAA-level revenue, were vanishingly rare. Indie games that make money do exist, but this is relative to the smaller amounts being spent to make them. (e.g. Torchlight was/is popular, but didn’t sell well enough to generate the revenue the developers were hoping to get. They had to cancel their plans for a follow-up game and do something much cheaper.) Some of the games you mention were made by as little as one person, so obviously the bar for profitability is set pretty low.
Although now that you mention it, popular indie games are rare, at least compared to how many get made each year – they’re still grossly outnumbered by the ones that lose money (even with their lower budgets).

By: Robert Drop

Robert Drop — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 18:50:00 +0000

I’d say people will be perfectly willing to buy games under these new, unpleasant publisher-privileging dynamics. I say that because they’ve already demonstrated that they are. Diablo 3 was a huge hit. Farmville brought in enough money to turn Zynga into a major game company. World of Warcraft is Activision’s biggest money maker. Despite the worst possible launch and negative publicity, Sim City 2013 will probably outsell all the previous games in that series put together. What I’m seeing people most object to is not that the game has been engineered to support a certain dynamic but that it’s not actually working when they want to play it.

By: Robert Drop

Robert Drop — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 18:36:00 +0000

The demo situation is interesting; companies largely stopped making them because a) the cost of demos increased along with game production, and b) they realized demos were not only not helping sales, they were actually hurting them. Broken out of the box isn't new, either. I remember buying games in the late '80s/early '90s that literally didn't run because they had been shipped broken. (And how many people were going to download the patch off the BBS?) Internet connections have made patching easier, so publishers are a bit more relaxed about the idea of fixing game problems post-release, but this is new only on consoles, really. Those phone/tablet games are indeed part of what's cutting into the AAA market. Games being made for a tiny, tiny fraction of what AAA games cost and being sold for less as well. Except they're not necessarily making any money, either (as their development costs could be where AAA gaming budgets were 20 years ago, and $4 games aren't going to pay for that unless you're at the very top of the sales charts). And the ones that are? They're making money off of micro-transactions and online play.

By: That_Anonymous_Coward

That_Anonymous_Coward — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 02:04:00 +0000

It is newish. But then I’m old enough to remember playable demos. Where you got your hands on the real thing with a limited content… but you could see if it actually worked.
Now we get 3d rendered artist visions of what the game will look like one they get the hologram system online.
Minimum Specs are a joke.
Broken out of the box is the norm.
Declaring war on the people who support you.

Sales are down because they are producing some foul crap and that let people to discover oh hey this android app I got for $3.99 works better than the $60 EA rehash of an idea they got 12 years ago. They could be hostile to consumers before… now it hurts because there are more ways and places for us to get and play games.

By: Gatto

Gatto — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 01:41:00 +0000

Just to provide some insight on “why not a flash drive?” Flash drives are expensive, but much more importantly ( from their perspective ) client side decryption can always be hacked. Witness the fact the 360, PS3, Wii, IPhone, etc. have all been hacked and rooted. The only way those systems lock themselves down is via their online services. And when you get an update: it can brick your console, or phone.

By: T-Boy

T-Boy — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 01:11:00 +0000

Pirates aren’t the one who lie and misrepresent numbers, and then beat consumers for those made-up numbers. Pirates aren’t the one who subvert democracy and strip away rights of citizens to sustain their profit margins.

So you can imagine why people aren’t mad at pirates.

By: T-Boy

T-Boy — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 01:08:00 +0000

I no longer care. It’s happened at least three times already. It’s no longer news to me. Any company that tries to pull that shit — even on franchises I loved — I stopped caring for.

It gets easy after the first half dozen franchises. It’s like second nature now.

By: T-Boy

T-Boy — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 01:04:00 +0000

As a customer, EA will make it your problem.

Nnnnope. EA and other customer- (and, eventually citizen-, because, of course, once they push for and support SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/TPP) hostile businesses that trade in entertainment seem to forget one thing —that while they require our money and participation to survive, we don’t require them to survive.

Sure, we don’t intrinsically deserve, as customers, non-broken, fair, equitable games, or an industry that treats us all like potential thieves. Sure. But they don’t intrinsically deserve survival, and they better remember that.

Capitalism, right? That’s how it’s supposed to work? Or are we going to abandon pretending all that shit now was the truth and say that we live in a Too-Big-To-Fail Corporatist Environment, and I just failed to get the memo for that already?

By: Gatto

Gatto — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 00:47:00 +0000

As a person who has worked on both AAA and indy games, I agree with Robert. I think he’s trying to explain EA’s decisions, not defend them.

Making games is a bit like gambling… the more you put down, the more you can win ( or lose ). It’s risky, but the big publishers like to bet big.For them, online-always kills several birds with one stone. It’s a form of DRM, it’s a form of limiting used-game sales, it’s a revenue stream, it allows for easy updates to popular games, it lets them see how people are playing their games, and it can provide features for gamers that are difficult to provide otherwise. The only thing that suck for them are fiascos like this.

One thing I can’t understand is why didn’t EA have a huge beta for SimCity like Diablo3 and every MMO in existence. It makes no sense at all.

By: DreadJester

DreadJester — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 19:16:00 +0000

Since I can’t reply to your post I’ll reply to mine.
You said popular indie games were rare. Once again not true at all. Here’s a short list
Little Inferno
Orks Must Die
Journey
FTL
World of Goo
Retro City Rampage
Chivalry
Torchlight
FEZ
Mark of the Ninja
Spelunky

I could go on as I know there’s plenty more popular ones. Just because in your mind the more money spent = more money earned does not make it true. To be honest when big money gets involved in anything things usually go downhill fast……..

By: Robert Drop

Robert Drop — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 17:05:00 +0000

As a customer, EA will make it your problem. Their problem is that the technological and graphical expectations of players keep increasing while the budgets required to fulfill that expectation are increasingly unsustainable. What that means is that the AAA portion of the industry is in ever-increasing need of getting their shit together and figuring out a radically different way of doing things. What EA’s doing now represents their desperate attempts to try to figure out, apparently through mindless flailing, what people will put up with/what will work. They’ll keep flailing until they run into a solution.

By: Andrew Conlon

Andrew Conlon — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:56:00 +0000

Actually most of the reviews were fairly positive, at least the ones I read. And the few hours I managed to play, were pretty good as well. It actually is a very fun game. City size is fine, the game wants you to do regions with interconnecting services, which adds a fair bit of complexity. Different doesn’t mean worse.

That said; it is completely broken, I very surprised at how completely borked their servers are, especially in light of recent epic flops likes Diablo 3. I would think that Diablo 3′s launch would have a big sign next to it saying “don’t do this!”. Its stranger because I actually think Blizzard tried hard to fix these problems, but it doesn’t seem like EA actually cares. They added a small handful of servers to try to fix it, and they launcher “queue” isn’t, its a timer for when you’re allowed to TRY to reconnect to a server. Blizzards servers were full, or dead, so I can’t connect, EA just tells me to not bother for 20 minutes. This annoys me more than a normal outage.

By: Robert Drop

Robert Drop — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:56:00 +0000

Outliers are meaningless I’m afraid. Those are, indeed, indie games with AAA game level revenues. But how many more indie games are there like that? Almost none. How many indie games are made? So many they can’t be counted. I could show you more than one AAA game that made more money than all those indie games put together and then some (though it would probably be a completely forgettable game). When we’re talking about indie games, the ratio of failed games to a modestly successful one is quite large. Rovio made dozens of games before Angry Birds, and most indie studios won’t ever see a fraction of that success no matter how many games they make. (Rovio is also spending AAA-level sums on Angry Birds these days.) Anyone building a business plan on having the next Angry Birds is just as much an idiot as someone counting on winning the lottery, as there’s the same level of dumb luck required for both, no matter how talented the creators.

By: DreadJester

DreadJester — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:37:00 +0000

Problem here is that companies aren’t bothering to try to make DRM un-obtrusive. It’s like someone who has something they want to keep safe so they put it in a safe but then decide that’s not enough, so they put the safe inside another safe, but that’s not enough either, so they put both safes in a locker with a lock, but that’s not enough so the locker with the safes go inside of an electric fence…… on an on until it takes hours just to get to the prized item.

Instead of coming up with a better way they just keep taking on more and more DRM which is creating exactly the situation Brandon talked about. How about the flash drive method I mentioned above?? How about they come up with a completely different and non-obtrusive way to handle it? No, we’ll just keep tacking on more till it destroys the game industry.

By: Robert Drop

Robert Drop — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:33:00 +0000

Oddly enough I suspect it has very little to do with that (after all, most of that isn’t new), but shifts in how/where people play games.

By: DreadJester

DreadJester — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:27:00 +0000

Once again, more BS. Forcing games to always be online is not the best way to handle DRM and it’s doing nothing but creating broken games and pissed off gamers. It’s a way to quickly flush a game down the toilet. As for stoping piracy it’s a horrible way to stop piracy since I can simply buy one game at the store, bring it home and get the code to activate the game from the box, take it back to the store, tell them disk is broken, get a new code. Lather, rinse, repeat, and I can supply my whole group of friends with codes with the cost of one game.

If you want better DRM find a better way to get the game to the computer. Allow me to present you a method that I thought of 3 years ago. Put the games on secure flash drives. There’s not downloading to a hard drive, you bring the flash drive home, you pop it into your USB port and away you go playing. All updates go straight to the flash drive and playing from an authorized flash drive is the only way to play it. Online interactions are minor, once to authorize the flash drive initally, and for updates and extra content which are decided on by the owner. Combine this with some really cool one of a kind flash drives and you’ve got people actually wanting to buy the game for the cool flash drive it comes with.

By: DreadJester

DreadJester — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:12:00 +0000

And yet, some of the most popular, well known games right now wer made by a particularly small development teams for a particuarly small amounts of money. I don’t buy this for one minute and neither is anyone else. More money spent, better voice acting, more devolopers does not equal a better game.

The proof is out there, Minecraft, League of Legends, Angry Birds. These are current legendary games and they didn’t involve any large number of people or huge budgets to produce. I promise you, 25 years from now games such as those will still be on everyone’s mind as “ground breaking” games while games like Mass Effect 3 will barely be remembered and the new Sim City will be remembered as a huge dud and an example of what not to do.

By: Tynam

Tynam — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 09:30:00 +0000

Robert Drop is precisely correct. Those movie-quality top-tier graphics? They cost just as much to make as for movies. For a random example... I've just finished Mass Effect 3. Take a look at the IMDb page cast list, and then remember that that's just the "film" jobs and doesn't include the majority of the actual development team.

By: Daemonworks

Daemonworks — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 09:21:00 +0000

I also remember when SimCity was good. Never mind the server issues, the initial reviews weren’t great either. Apparently city size caps out rather low, amongst other issues.

By: That_Anonymous_Coward

That_Anonymous_Coward — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 07:52:00 +0000

If this is your example of a AAA game, you might need a whole new rating system.

By: That_Anonymous_Coward

That_Anonymous_Coward — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 07:50:00 +0000

”while sales have been down”
Maybe if they stopped over promising, delivering broken crap that needs 3 months of patches to be playable, and stopped trying to kill the used game market and delivered quality product to the consumers they might start buying again.

By: Paulo Silva

Paulo Silva — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 05:50:00 +0000

It’s part of a larger strategy (scam) to turn games into a service. No more piracy, games become continuous revenue streams, etc. (are able to squeeze more money from customers)

FTFY

By: C W

C W — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 04:54:00 +0000

This ain’t true as long as the games are enjoyable and the DRM isn’t too obtrusive.

If the games won’t run and the DRM adds to the frustration, yeah, then you’ll have problems.

By: C W

C W — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 04:50:00 +0000

Oh, I’ll just play less AAA games. I’m playing less and less as say, Origin and other services are made essential.

By: CastanhasDoPara

CastanhasDoPara — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:43:00 +0000

Cute…

Not funny;

but cute.