> There's also the question of preserving gaming history. As we saw with THQ last month, publishers aren't immortal. They can die, and had THQ implemented always-online DRM in Darksiders II, all copies of that game might've died with it when the rights to the series weren't bought up by another publisher.
That's the part that concerns me the most. I still install (and play) lots of old games on every computer I own -- King's Quest VI, C&C: Red Alert, Worms: Armageddon, etc. And who could live without the console classics like Goldeneye or Ocarina of Time? All you have to do is pull out the disc (or cartridge), pop it in, and play.
We still don't know exactly what will happen with this new generation of games that consumers are merely "renting" from companies like EA, but piracy seems to be our only guaranteed method of preserving them. What happens if you want to play Battlefield 3 again 10 years from now? You might be able to access it IFF:
1. Your account is still in good standing (not banned)
2. EA still exists
3. EA has decided to maintain support for Origin
4. EA has decided to maintain support for Battlefield 3
5. You remember your PW or can prove to EA you're the account owner
There's not much history to base this speculation on yet, but what little we do have shows that that's an extremely unlikely scenario. If there's any chance to preserve the games we're playing now, it's probably up to us to make it happen.
I think the real mismatch for EA and Gamers is that EA is effectively selling a SaaS product but pricing it like it's an boxed product.
It's not just unlikely but, in fact, impossible for the operating costs of the servers to be worth keeping on forever since no (significant) additional income will be coming in from the title after some point X.
SaaS companies have been dealing with this for years quite successfully via their "pay as you go" monthly subscriptions. This keeps the money flowing in and motivation to keep the servers on. And, better yet, it gives the consumer confidence that the service provider is going to pay attention to the product long-term, not just during launch day.
My recommendation for EA moving forward would be to move to subscription pricing for any games that operate as online-only - single- or multi-player.
Exact pricing is important as well. My initial instinct was to say that they should prorate the cost, something like $5/month but I quickly realized why this wouldn't work. Obviously most gamers are fickle and have short attention spans. 90% of buyers probably wouldn't buy month two and it wouldn't work out.
Instead, I would recommend pricing the game at something like $60 for two years. Same price and clearer value to me as a customer. Suddenly I'm not worried if they are going to shut off the servers in four years because that's not what I'm paying for today (and really never was). I'm paying for the opportunity to play this week and, if I love it, play it over and over again for two full years. Is that worth $60? Absolutely! And what about in two years? If I'm still loving it, hopefully they let me renew for another two years, maybe even at a discount. And if the game ends up sucking and nobody renews, they can turn the servers off (or throttle them down) without feeling bad.
The real risk with the current system isn't in case the game is a flop and they turn the servers off prematurely. It's actually if the game is legendary, like SimCities of past, and the passion to play keeps momentum for decades. How can EA keep the lights on?
but piracy seems to be our only guaranteed method of preserving them
You aren't going to pirate Sim City 5.
This is the future of gaming. Companies are just going to avoid all the grief of piracy and weird DRM by either moving to locked-down platforms (iOS and consoles) or into games that have essential online components.
It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. I'd love to by a game and install it on my PC without it taking things over, and the publishers would love to write that and not worry about DRM. But we can't get that because each of us doesn't trust the other party to defect.
Same here, I love re-visiting old titles. Even dead-ish MMOs these days, such as Everquest, have 3rd party servers that still let you play something similar to the original game.
This is like the "good old days" of TV and movies, when you could only watch the Wizard of Oz once a year at Halloween, and you couldn't watch any old movies at all unless they came on the Late Show or showed at a local art theater.
I don't know why a game publisher wouldn't want to sell new copies of old games forever, like you can do with movies in the good new days.
...and if games these days really are dependent upon services at the publisher working to do more than just validate DRM (which can usually be worked around with some very clever TOS-voiding hackery providing a local server and lying to the game client), there won't even be a way that they could just "tell the game to switch it off" before they decomm that service.
Quip seen on Twitter [1]: "Disabling features of SimCity due to ineffective central infrastructure is probably the most realistic simulation of the modern city."
It's an interesting case study. This happens with nearly every MMO and people grumble but accept it. Within a couple weeks, the server issues are mostly resolved and people don't think about it anymore.
And yet, people are pissed about this. The fact that people see the game as single player seems to make a huge difference. It seems the lesson is that, if you want to do the always-on thing, you need to design your game so that it doesn't even make sense to play it alone.
I'm really curious to see what SimCity's sales are like in a month though. I wouldn't be too terribly shocked if people just sucked it up and bought it anyway as long as the servers are stable. If that happens, then maybe EA didn't make such a mistake after all?
Server woes are a necessary evil with MMOs, and people buy the game knowing they'll have to deal with some amount of downtime due to maintenance, overcrowding or just plain growing pains.
Try telling FPS players that their game will be unavailable every Tuesday morning for 6-12 hours and they'll probably riot -- that's standard downtime in the MMO world though.
People are pissed because it's an artificial restriction. People understand that talking to a server is necessary for an MMO to work, and they also understand it is not necessary for SimCity to work.
When an MMO talks to a server. it's in the user's best interest. When SimCity tries to talk to a server, it's against the user's best interest, who might want to play in a place without an internet connection, but is prevented to do so by a system that does nothing for him or her to begin with. It's weird that this is not obvious.
> The fact that people see the game as single player seems to make a huge difference.
Indeed. And there's also the fact that MMO are — for the most part — "long term" experiences. Now single-player games can be as well, but for the most part are not, the majority of Diablo III buyers have probably moved on already to some other games, where a WoW player will be in it for years, so the rough few first weeks aren't much of an issue.
I wouldn't be too terribly shocked if people just sucked it
up and bought it anyway as long as the servers are stable.
Agreed. I have a couple of friends who are avoiding it, but I have colleagues that are going to get the game anyway despite whinging about EA being terrible.
(The above is anecdotal at best, but my gut feeling is that this will hurt EA in more than the very short term. See also: Blizzard with Diablo 3.)
If they had called this Sim City Online and marketed as not the next Sim City, but more of an MMO like Ever Quest, Guild Wars, and Star Wars Galaxies would be people be complaining as much if they knew they had to be online to play it.
Sim City 4, 2000, and the original still run perfect and are extremely fun to play. Sim City 4 is on Steam even making it easy to get right now. I'm tempted to pick that up since I have not played it. I loved the original and 2000 though.
In another discussion on hn, someone was basically saying "no one acts so surprised when you can't access Facebook if your internet connection is down, why are they so ticked off here?" I'd argue that it's because most people have a reasonable expectation that a locally-installed, single-player game should work regardless of connectivity.
There may be potentially valid technical reasons why SimCity might need or even want a persistent connection, but you absolutely need to call that out.
With EA's record of shutting down still-active servers for the multi-player portions of games that were just a few years old, I would be very reticent to buy an EA product that required a server even for single-player mode.
Yeah I agree, how can a mega billion company like EA fail so badly on marketing. Strategy should've been simple:
1) release it as sim city online, with marketing emphasizing it's like a sim city mmo. People will be more tolerant of launch network issues. Make lots of $$$
2) later release single player sim city 5 (just rip out online parts from above) make more $$$
So what would make it different from a regular SimCity game? The fact that it has the word online after it? That's a weak argument at best. They from the start called it a new game, not a sequel, and its been known for a long time that it would have the always-on component.
The game was never meant to be a sequel. That's why it's calls SimCity and not SimCity 5. People just decide to interpret it as such even if its not.
They could still have all these social/online features and not require internet-DRM to play.
You play your game, and if you want to do something social and the servers are down -- it sucks, but you can still play, and take part in the social stuff when it is up and working.
For online saves -- there is a local backup for when the online system is down.
These are not difficult things. They are just trying to fight an ever-losing battle against piracy.
If you want to play 2000, GOG.com has it for 6 bucks. Works perfectly on my mac, and I love playing it while offline on my long train ride. It's a shame, since when I am offline is the only time I play games, that I won't get to play the new one...
Sim City 4 is (still) superb. However, you will likely want to mod it to get the most out of it. There are also a lot of pointlessly finicky things in terms of maintaining a good budget.. enough so that I just enable a cheat for tons of money and forget about budgeting altogether (since the rest of the game is so deep, skipping financial worries loses you little and gains you a lot).
I grabbed it on Steam last year after losing my hard copy some years ago. If one waits for a big Steam sale or adds Sim City 4 to their wish list, they get notified when it goes on sale and the typical price is 4.99 with all the addons as well. Lots of community mods out there for the game for anyone interested that fix some bugs like traffic issues.
12 years ago I quit gaming because decent titles weren't available for Linux. I now have a great job and family, part of which I attribute to spending thousands of hours learning about life and technology instead of playing games.
Give it up people, video games = fast-forwarding your life.
(Actually I'm not really suggesting being that strict. I did return to play the occasional top title like Portal 2, but on a strictly controlled diet. Gaming should be a small enough part of your life that such DRM is a non-issue)
Having played simcity as much as the servers have allowed since launch, there are definitely a number of online tie-ins. I'm sure they could have done it with player run servers or LAN type connectivity, but it removes the social aspect of the game. I rather line being able to look at the leader board, then load the cities listed there to see what they look like.
Playing with a few friends in a region is a pretty cool idea, though there are fewer interactions as I would have liked, there are still a lot.
Their server connectivity is definitu beyond just DRM, but it's hard to say how they could have done their design without the server aspect.
I've been looking forward to this game for years now. I thought it would never come. And now that it's here I'm totally saddened and appalled that EA would ruin such an incredible legacy for such petty reasons.
There has to be another way to stem piracy without totally obliterating the value of an otherwise excellent game...
If anyone could achieve a decent launch, it's blizzard. They have a lot of money and talent, and a real attention to detail. They're willing to wait to ship games "till they're ready"
But launch still eludes them. I've purchased every game through Diablo 3, but that put me off the whole thing. Heart of the swarm will be the first Blizzard game i just don't bother with. The launch will be a disaster. Since they've taken away any reason for me to get excited about the launch, i've found that really leaks over into my excitement about the game.
Good luck to EA, good luck to Blizzard, you've committed your businesses to a technical infrastructure you're just not competent to build or manage. Seems like a risky strategy to me. Especially because games aren't really that important. It's not critical like food. There are a bunch of other offerings available.
Can someone explain what exactly happened with SimCity? From the article I gather that it had something to do with DRM but the author never explained what exactly made it unplayable.
You have to be connected to their servers to play it, just like you would with an MMO style game. Unfortunately, just like an MMO style game at launch, their servers are totally overloaded right now and many people are just completely unable to play the game.
The uproar is because the online requirement isn't inherently necessary to the gameplay (although EA has done their best to add some multiplayer aspects). It's primarily a business decision intending to make it more difficult to pirate or buy the game used.
The latest, just released, version of SimCity includes a form of DRM which basically involves hosting a part of the game's functions on a server, so that the only way to play the game is to be connected to the server. Due to whatever reason, likely poor capacity planning, a huge number of people who have bought the game have not been able to play it at all due to the servers being overloaded or inaccessible.
Trouble downloading and installing the game, massive login queues (that recheck the queue once every 30 minutes), trouble creating cities, troubles loading creating cities, disconnections, features have been removed to help handle stress, etc.
Basically, it's hard to get it downloaded and installed.
If you do that, it's very difficult to login to play.
If you manage that, it's very difficult to do the tutorial or claim a city or load your city.
If you manage that, it's very difficult to play the game without experiencing disconnects or server-related dysfunction that directly affects gameplay.
Basically, it's nothing like the experience they wanted to deliver.
> let it be yet another lesson to publishers like EA and Activision/Blizzard, and platform owners Microsoft and Sony, who may be considering always-on DRM in next-gen consoles or PC games: don't even think about it. It's a pipe dream
But this is Always-Online DRM done wrong. You DO NOT prioritize prevention of pirate-enabled playing of your game. You DO NOT implement anything which causes legitimate users to not be able to play. You DO prioritize UX over anything else at launch. You bias heavily to avoid false positives. Legit users (i.e. customers) are your first priority -- as they should be.
Most of all, you do not live in the fantasy world of DRM being some kind of impenetrable fortress. Basically, the resources of the entire Internet are arrayed against you, and the forces on your side constitute several hundred people in your company at most. You as the game publisher aren't the evil empire. You're the guerrillas. You don't have a vast army and an impenetrable fortress. You have a few fighters on your side and a jungle to hide in.
Here is what you do: You prioritize detection. You let the pirates play. You let the pirates believe that they've broken your DRM by throwing some honeypot DRM at them for them to break. All the while, you're detecting them. Then, when they think they've won, you use assets that you can control (servers) to restrict the pirate-enabled users you've detected. The point here is to be the one to keep the pirates guessing, not the other way around. Let them announce cracks, then make sure they get egg on their face a week after their "release -- again and again. Basically, you fight dirty to make sure that your product is far superior to the pirate's.
The way to have DLC in the modern age is to make sure that a key element of your "DLC" always stays on the server.
I do not understand the gamer community. EA has been treating you guys like crap for years and you keep coming back for more. Just stop buying their products. I know it sucks not to have access to a new game, but make a stand for an industry you care about and stop supporting a lousy company that has distain for you.
I treat anything that is DRM-encumbered as a rental, and make buying decisions accordingly. It is not something I own, and I do not expect to be able to use it beyond a certain time horizon (a year or two).
Yep. For any game with severely limiting DRM, the maximum price I'm willing to pay is $5, which I deem fair for an indeterminate rental with no guarantees.
I think Assassin's Creed 2 has been down to $6 a couple times on Steam sales, but I'm not quite willing to put down even one extra dollar. Oh well, their loss. Meanwhile, I've spent a couple hundred dollars on Kickstarter games in the recent past, all of which promised a DRM free option.
I'm sorry but as a gaming enthusiast, I'm experiencing some major schadenfreude here.
EA's tactics, ethics and influence have been the worst in the industry for the last 10 years. Pushing DRM, buying up smaller studios, releasing endless add-on packs and DLC. Thankfully I haven't been addicted to any of their games since Dungeon Keeper. That was a great game.
I feel so sorry for guys and girls responsible for keeping the systems up and running at EA. Days without sleep, without a doubt. And I'm sure their managers are cracking the whips and blaming all the bad things an them.
I've been kind of surprised by ign's writing lately. They've gotten a lot more thoughtful, past the simple game review writing and have much more intelligent pieces these days.
I don't actually think this is a danger of always on DRM more growing pains from an industry (gaming) that is learning how to build infrastructure that can scale to the size of their audience. Games are going to move toward becoming services just like any popular web app you use in your day to day life and I am not mad about that. I don't ever give a second though to whether Pivotal Tracker, Evernote or Flickr will be around in a few years, I accept the thought that may not be and use the tools because I enjoy them.
Gaming as a medium is trying to evolve and find a business model that can allow them to scale games to audiences that are bigger and trying to make them more complex without having to tap into all the power your computer / console may have. I have worked in the game industry and while I can support people being upset and I am more interested in how this impacts the type of gameplay experiences we have in the future.
I would be interested in seeing startups spring up around supporting cloud infrastructure and analytics for game companies. Sort of like an amazon for Game Devs
Can someone confirm that the online mode offers nothing but DRM? The fact that they had to disable Cheetah speed makes me think they really are offloading some of the game simulations to the servers. It certainly feels like a much speedier game then SimCity 4 (when it works).
I don't expect more game companies to stay away from this; I expect them to do this a lot more for PC gaming. Probably not explicitly, but as much as people in /r/technology insists piracy doesn't matter, the companies continue to care. With online games, the need to worry about that largely evaporates.
Instead, I expect companies to put in proper rate limiting, fallbacks, and plan for the ability to spin up extra servers in case of high demand.
I dunno, you don't see the outcry when the thing is reliably up and working correctly. I play several games that are "always on" or "internet only," and we gamers seem completely fine with it as long as up-time is 99.99%.
People bought the game knowing the DRM would be heavy. That's not what's killing SimCity. The real reason this failed is because it broke. It crashed and burned terrifically. It was implemented poorly, and it was really unreliable.
The warning here is this: make shit that works. We would see the same outcry if an offline game crashed regularly, deleted saves, and had bugs on opening day that made it unplayable.
Having been required to defend undefensible companies policies in some customer service jobs I previously held, I feel really sorry for the customer service agent here. Probably somebody hoping to use this job as a leg up to something better, but now he is stuck in angry customer hell with nothing to do but quote policies that make them angrier. And his performance is probably being judged based on some customer satisfaction survey where even one unsatisfied customer is enough to lose a month's worth of bonuses.
[+] [-] Irregardless|13 years ago|reply
That's the part that concerns me the most. I still install (and play) lots of old games on every computer I own -- King's Quest VI, C&C: Red Alert, Worms: Armageddon, etc. And who could live without the console classics like Goldeneye or Ocarina of Time? All you have to do is pull out the disc (or cartridge), pop it in, and play.
We still don't know exactly what will happen with this new generation of games that consumers are merely "renting" from companies like EA, but piracy seems to be our only guaranteed method of preserving them. What happens if you want to play Battlefield 3 again 10 years from now? You might be able to access it IFF:
There's not much history to base this speculation on yet, but what little we do have shows that that's an extremely unlikely scenario. If there's any chance to preserve the games we're playing now, it's probably up to us to make it happen.[+] [-] tobyjsullivan|13 years ago|reply
It's not just unlikely but, in fact, impossible for the operating costs of the servers to be worth keeping on forever since no (significant) additional income will be coming in from the title after some point X.
SaaS companies have been dealing with this for years quite successfully via their "pay as you go" monthly subscriptions. This keeps the money flowing in and motivation to keep the servers on. And, better yet, it gives the consumer confidence that the service provider is going to pay attention to the product long-term, not just during launch day.
My recommendation for EA moving forward would be to move to subscription pricing for any games that operate as online-only - single- or multi-player.
Exact pricing is important as well. My initial instinct was to say that they should prorate the cost, something like $5/month but I quickly realized why this wouldn't work. Obviously most gamers are fickle and have short attention spans. 90% of buyers probably wouldn't buy month two and it wouldn't work out.
Instead, I would recommend pricing the game at something like $60 for two years. Same price and clearer value to me as a customer. Suddenly I'm not worried if they are going to shut off the servers in four years because that's not what I'm paying for today (and really never was). I'm paying for the opportunity to play this week and, if I love it, play it over and over again for two full years. Is that worth $60? Absolutely! And what about in two years? If I'm still loving it, hopefully they let me renew for another two years, maybe even at a discount. And if the game ends up sucking and nobody renews, they can turn the servers off (or throttle them down) without feeling bad.
The real risk with the current system isn't in case the game is a flop and they turn the servers off prematurely. It's actually if the game is legendary, like SimCities of past, and the passion to play keeps momentum for decades. How can EA keep the lights on?
[+] [-] danielweber|13 years ago|reply
You aren't going to pirate Sim City 5.
This is the future of gaming. Companies are just going to avoid all the grief of piracy and weird DRM by either moving to locked-down platforms (iOS and consoles) or into games that have essential online components.
It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. I'd love to by a game and install it on my PC without it taking things over, and the publishers would love to write that and not worry about DRM. But we can't get that because each of us doesn't trust the other party to defect.
[+] [-] akurilin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonamegiven|13 years ago|reply
I don't know why a game publisher wouldn't want to sell new copies of old games forever, like you can do with movies in the good new days.
[+] [-] seanp2k2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjn|13 years ago|reply
[1] https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/309756131155271680
[+] [-] ryusage|13 years ago|reply
And yet, people are pissed about this. The fact that people see the game as single player seems to make a huge difference. It seems the lesson is that, if you want to do the always-on thing, you need to design your game so that it doesn't even make sense to play it alone.
I'm really curious to see what SimCity's sales are like in a month though. I wouldn't be too terribly shocked if people just sucked it up and bought it anyway as long as the servers are stable. If that happens, then maybe EA didn't make such a mistake after all?
[+] [-] Irregardless|13 years ago|reply
Try telling FPS players that their game will be unavailable every Tuesday morning for 6-12 hours and they'll probably riot -- that's standard downtime in the MMO world though.
[+] [-] TelmoMenezes|13 years ago|reply
When an MMO talks to a server. it's in the user's best interest. When SimCity tries to talk to a server, it's against the user's best interest, who might want to play in a place without an internet connection, but is prevented to do so by a system that does nothing for him or her to begin with. It's weird that this is not obvious.
[+] [-] dacilselig|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|13 years ago|reply
Indeed. And there's also the fact that MMO are — for the most part — "long term" experiences. Now single-player games can be as well, but for the most part are not, the majority of Diablo III buyers have probably moved on already to some other games, where a WoW player will be in it for years, so the rough few first weeks aren't much of an issue.
[+] [-] damncabbage|13 years ago|reply
(The above is anecdotal at best, but my gut feeling is that this will hurt EA in more than the very short term. See also: Blizzard with Diablo 3.)
[+] [-] Guvante|13 years ago|reply
Players are losing save games, either getting reverted or forced to start from scratch.
[+] [-] b3b0p|13 years ago|reply
Sim City 4, 2000, and the original still run perfect and are extremely fun to play. Sim City 4 is on Steam even making it easy to get right now. I'm tempted to pick that up since I have not played it. I loved the original and 2000 though.
[+] [-] jordan0day|13 years ago|reply
In another discussion on hn, someone was basically saying "no one acts so surprised when you can't access Facebook if your internet connection is down, why are they so ticked off here?" I'd argue that it's because most people have a reasonable expectation that a locally-installed, single-player game should work regardless of connectivity.
There may be potentially valid technical reasons why SimCity might need or even want a persistent connection, but you absolutely need to call that out.
With EA's record of shutting down still-active servers for the multi-player portions of games that were just a few years old, I would be very reticent to buy an EA product that required a server even for single-player mode.
[+] [-] cpprototypes|13 years ago|reply
1) release it as sim city online, with marketing emphasizing it's like a sim city mmo. People will be more tolerant of launch network issues. Make lots of $$$
2) later release single player sim city 5 (just rip out online parts from above) make more $$$
Such an inept company.
[+] [-] mynameisvlad|13 years ago|reply
The game was never meant to be a sequel. That's why it's calls SimCity and not SimCity 5. People just decide to interpret it as such even if its not.
[+] [-] borlak|13 years ago|reply
You play your game, and if you want to do something social and the servers are down -- it sucks, but you can still play, and take part in the social stuff when it is up and working.
For online saves -- there is a local backup for when the online system is down.
These are not difficult things. They are just trying to fight an ever-losing battle against piracy.
[+] [-] crisnoble|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petercooper|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yareally|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andylei|13 years ago|reply
doesn't Steam also have DRM?
[+] [-] jl6|13 years ago|reply
Give it up people, video games = fast-forwarding your life.
(Actually I'm not really suggesting being that strict. I did return to play the occasional top title like Portal 2, but on a strictly controlled diet. Gaming should be a small enough part of your life that such DRM is a non-issue)
[+] [-] kyrra|13 years ago|reply
Playing with a few friends in a region is a pretty cool idea, though there are fewer interactions as I would have liked, there are still a lot.
Their server connectivity is definitu beyond just DRM, but it's hard to say how they could have done their design without the server aspect.
[+] [-] seanoliver|13 years ago|reply
There has to be another way to stem piracy without totally obliterating the value of an otherwise excellent game...
[+] [-] jfoutz|13 years ago|reply
But launch still eludes them. I've purchased every game through Diablo 3, but that put me off the whole thing. Heart of the swarm will be the first Blizzard game i just don't bother with. The launch will be a disaster. Since they've taken away any reason for me to get excited about the launch, i've found that really leaks over into my excitement about the game.
Good luck to EA, good luck to Blizzard, you've committed your businesses to a technical infrastructure you're just not competent to build or manage. Seems like a risky strategy to me. Especially because games aren't really that important. It's not critical like food. There are a bunch of other offerings available.
[+] [-] error54|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryusage|13 years ago|reply
The uproar is because the online requirement isn't inherently necessary to the gameplay (although EA has done their best to add some multiplayer aspects). It's primarily a business decision intending to make it more difficult to pirate or buy the game used.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] error54|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] criley|13 years ago|reply
Basically, it's hard to get it downloaded and installed.
If you do that, it's very difficult to login to play.
If you manage that, it's very difficult to do the tutorial or claim a city or load your city.
If you manage that, it's very difficult to play the game without experiencing disconnects or server-related dysfunction that directly affects gameplay.
Basically, it's nothing like the experience they wanted to deliver.
[+] [-] kwanbis|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stcredzero|13 years ago|reply
But this is Always-Online DRM done wrong. You DO NOT prioritize prevention of pirate-enabled playing of your game. You DO NOT implement anything which causes legitimate users to not be able to play. You DO prioritize UX over anything else at launch. You bias heavily to avoid false positives. Legit users (i.e. customers) are your first priority -- as they should be.
Most of all, you do not live in the fantasy world of DRM being some kind of impenetrable fortress. Basically, the resources of the entire Internet are arrayed against you, and the forces on your side constitute several hundred people in your company at most. You as the game publisher aren't the evil empire. You're the guerrillas. You don't have a vast army and an impenetrable fortress. You have a few fighters on your side and a jungle to hide in.
Here is what you do: You prioritize detection. You let the pirates play. You let the pirates believe that they've broken your DRM by throwing some honeypot DRM at them for them to break. All the while, you're detecting them. Then, when they think they've won, you use assets that you can control (servers) to restrict the pirate-enabled users you've detected. The point here is to be the one to keep the pirates guessing, not the other way around. Let them announce cracks, then make sure they get egg on their face a week after their "release -- again and again. Basically, you fight dirty to make sure that your product is far superior to the pirate's.
The way to have DLC in the modern age is to make sure that a key element of your "DLC" always stays on the server.
[+] [-] rohern|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwr|13 years ago|reply
Same goes for DRM-protected books or music.
[+] [-] npsimons|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TillE|13 years ago|reply
I think Assassin's Creed 2 has been down to $6 a couple times on Steam sales, but I'm not quite willing to put down even one extra dollar. Oh well, their loss. Meanwhile, I've spent a couple hundred dollars on Kickstarter games in the recent past, all of which promised a DRM free option.
[+] [-] zerohm|13 years ago|reply
EA's tactics, ethics and influence have been the worst in the industry for the last 10 years. Pushing DRM, buying up smaller studios, releasing endless add-on packs and DLC. Thankfully I haven't been addicted to any of their games since Dungeon Keeper. That was a great game.
[+] [-] rozap|13 years ago|reply
It just makes me sad to think of :(
[+] [-] ScotterC|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] zdgman|13 years ago|reply
Gaming as a medium is trying to evolve and find a business model that can allow them to scale games to audiences that are bigger and trying to make them more complex without having to tap into all the power your computer / console may have. I have worked in the game industry and while I can support people being upset and I am more interested in how this impacts the type of gameplay experiences we have in the future.
I would be interested in seeing startups spring up around supporting cloud infrastructure and analytics for game companies. Sort of like an amazon for Game Devs
[+] [-] ry0ohki|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielweber|13 years ago|reply
I don't expect more game companies to stay away from this; I expect them to do this a lot more for PC gaming. Probably not explicitly, but as much as people in /r/technology insists piracy doesn't matter, the companies continue to care. With online games, the need to worry about that largely evaporates.
Instead, I expect companies to put in proper rate limiting, fallbacks, and plan for the ability to spin up extra servers in case of high demand.
[+] [-] s666|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ignostic|13 years ago|reply
People bought the game knowing the DRM would be heavy. That's not what's killing SimCity. The real reason this failed is because it broke. It crashed and burned terrifically. It was implemented poorly, and it was really unreliable.
The warning here is this: make shit that works. We would see the same outcry if an offline game crashed regularly, deleted saves, and had bugs on opening day that made it unplayable.
[+] [-] davidroberts|13 years ago|reply