When we published a piece on always-on DRM this Wednesday, we mentioned SimCity, but we assumed that by Friday, it would have these issues ironed out, and the game would be playable.
We were very, very wrong. Forget fire lizards and tornadoes: Somebody save SimCity from its own protection measures!
EA has been doing everything to get the game to actually work. They’ve disabled “non-essential” features and they’ve added servers, and Maxis and EA are going into the weekend dealing with… uh… enraged gamers in Asia and Europe as well.
While EA is desperately trying to put a happy face on the measures, the simple reality is that they were clearly caught completely flat-footed by this. This goes well beyond launch day screw-ups; going into today, there are people who got the game Tuesday who haven’t built a city yet. All of this is baffling because, well, they can read, and the last time an eagerly anticipated PC exclusive came along, it was Diablo III, which had more or less the exact same problems.
And EA also is abundantly aware that their own customers don’t like always-on DRM; the rather ugly Reddit AMA with Maxis personnel rapidly turned into an anti-DRM argument. Pretty much everything the more level-headed Redditors out there predicted would go wrong did.
Will EA admit defeat and change the DRM? Doubtful. The game was built around this concept, and to change it would require some fairly significant back-end changes that Maxis likely can’t afford and EA likely wouldn’t want them to do anyway.
But hopefully this makes the entire game industry stop and think. DRM is going to be a part of gaming for a while, but if it renders the game unplayable… what’s the point?
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Loose butthole
Have you considered eating a lot of fast food, to serve as an anal sealant?
I think I have a new SSID.
EA needs to be stopped at all costs!
I for one would like to hug the guys who made sure DRM was included in the final product.
Thus holding them in place for some clean sniper shots.
I kid, I kid.
But seriously, I hope they learn their lesson by suffering an extreme economic setback.
Name the time and place.
Wear a red hat so I know who not to shoot.
Such a waste, I wanted this game, but there’s no way I’m buying it now. The game doesn’t even save to your local machine.
people have to stop buying stuff with always on drm. that’s the only way they’ll take a hint.
I wanted this game so badly. DRM or not, I’ve played them all and I wanted this one…but paying 60 bucks for a game, and not even getting to play it for a week….those horror stories killed it for me. 60 bucks isn’t easily spent. And anyone who was debating yes or no on picking this up probably dropped off after this launch. Or at least should have…
Yeah, I think this is the death knell for this s–t. Or at least, for the next 5 years or so until they try again. I mean, eventually everything from our TVs to toasters will have always-on Internet connections, but it’s just not doable yet.
What a joke the launch of this game has been and with always ON DRM they can go fuck themselves. this is exactly why I wont buy games nowadays you end up buying the deluxe version today for £64 to find you cant play it because the servers are down and the DRM wont work.
OFFLINE is what i wanna play most of the time on games like this, if I wanted to be social i’d leave the fucking house.
Nobody makes standalone offline games anymore everything is going towards Server side processing and DLC to tempt more money out fo you. Game publishers who have got the most money out fo me have been offline no monthly patches required good solid well thought out games which you cannot complete in 5-6 hrs.
yeah im rambling on (shutting up now)
No worries, that’s what the comments section is for.
I wish games that were primarily multiplayer just stopped screwing around and dumped single-player. If people are playing COD enough that it wears out their console’s disc drive, obviously single-player is redundant.
It looks interesting and I do like the multiplayer/social concepts, but the always-on DRM and having another download store/service is not my thing.
Yeah, I really don’t need an Origin account. It’s bad enough every Ubisoft game tries to get me to sign up on UPlay.
Has EA ever had good servers? I have to admit that my experience is mostly console based when it comes to EA, but back when I played Battlefield 2 on my original X-Box, servers dropped constantly. I can’t even play NFS titles that are more than a year old because the account information from when I bought the games has been lost or corrupted, and that’s REALLY disheartening because I miss my bright pink RX-8. I guess I just don’t understand that after about a decade of online multiplayer experiences EA is still so desperately behind every other game developer on how to effectively run their servers.
Short answer: They’ve found nobody cares enough to stop buying games.
Touche sir.
I think we’re seeing two different things and confusing them.
The big issue is that EA, and most game companies, always underestimate the server load needed for launch day. If they had adequate server load and everyone could play without issue it would be working as advertised with the only complaint being philosophical over DRM.
However since they did not have adequate server ability the attention can be turned to the DRM requirement even if they still required a connection to be active all the time for their social reasons.
I think they’re a bit more entwined than that. First of all, the server load problems are ENTIRELY because of the DRM. There’s absolutely no reason that the social aspects of the game can’t be asynchronous. And underestimating server load is goddamn insane in this day and age; I don’t know what happened behind the scenes, but my gut says they cheaped out, and it bit them.
I agree that if the DRM requirements weren’t screwing everything up, nobody would care.
Cities are saved to the cloud, public regions that sync up to influence your city every so often. It seems to me that the online/social aspect is the core gameplay and would require online connectivity all the time for the default game.
With the game being designed from the ground up to be online socially linked it just strikes me as piss poor server planning where internet nerds blame DRM instead of bad servers, I mean disabling Cheetah speed to lessen server load doesn’t strike me as a DRM issue.
My music is saved to a cloud too, but I also have it stored locally. I really think the DRM cart led the horse, here. EA saw that it was going to be PC only, decided to shove in always-on DRM, and then mandated to Maxis “Make this an online-only game”.
Your music is sure, but Pandora can’t be used without being connected to the internet. DRM issue is completely secondary to the game design being built for online game play as the primary method of game play for a traditionally single player offline game.
I’m more surprised by the fact that so many people actually ran out and bought this game.
I rarely play PC games any more and even I was weary about their always on internet connection requirement in light of what happened with Diablo III, (which still sold incredibly well).
I don’t understand what people were thinking was going to happen.
Nothing is going to stop these companies from releasing these disasters disguised as PC games as long as people keep buying them. Instead of complaining they should just bend over and say “thank you sir may I have another.”
I know you meant “wary”, but “weary” works so, so well in this context.
D’Oh!
I’d read that it was bad to the point that Amazon stopped selling the game, only to resume recently with a warning about the server issues.
My only other EA online gaming experience is with Simpsons: Tapped Out on the iOS – which was bad (the support is worse) but not epically terrible like this.
Yeah, by the time I wrote this, it was back up with no warning, and if I don’t see it in person, I assume Photoshop on nerd rage topics.
What the fuck is drm
…doesn’t care…
Digital rights management; basically, software that keeps you from giving your friend a free copy.
Viva Steam!
DRM was always a problem. and this is a clear reason why so many software pirates crack every game released on the market because people BUY games that never work due to failed CD anti copy protection and that crap..
and i can assure u with the release of the two new consoles xbox 720 and ps4 and their idea to make every single game cd unique to one console would be a complete failure and even more game crackers will get around it
popular failed cd protections: starforce, buddha.dll, SECUROM, DRM, origin, c-dilla, steam, much more
Out of about 1,800 Amazon re views, 1,600 are 1 star.
Eat it Sim City bosses. Your customers are no longer taking your crap.