SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM

&#62; <i>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.</i><p>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&#38;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.<p>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:<p><pre><code> 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 </code></pre> 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.

Quip seen on Twitter [1]: "Disabling features of SimCity due to ineffective central infrastructure is probably the most realistic simulation of the modern city."<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/309756131155271680" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/309756131155271680</a>

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.<p>And yet, people are <i>pissed</i> 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.<p>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?

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.<p>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.

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.<p>Give it up people, video games = fast-forwarding your life.<p>(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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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"<p>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.<p>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.

<i>&#62; 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</i><p>But this is Always-Online DRM <i>done wrong</i>. You <i>DO NOT</i> prioritize prevention of pirate-enabled playing of your game. You <i>DO NOT</i> implement anything which causes legitimate users to not be able to play. You <i>DO</i> prioritize UX over anything else at launch. You bias <i>heavily</i> to avoid false positives. Legit users (i.e. customers) are your first priority -- as they should be.<p>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 <i>at most.</i> 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.<p>Here is what you do: You prioritize detection. You <i>let the pirates play.</i> 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 <i>can</i> 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 <i>their</i> "release -- again and again. Basically, you fight dirty to make sure that your product is far superior to the pirate's.<p>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).<p>Same goes for DRM-protected books or music.

I'm sorry but as a gaming enthusiast, I'm experiencing some major schadenfreude here.<p>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.<p>It just makes me sad to think of :(

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.<p>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.<p>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 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%.<p>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.<p>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.

So can I pirate this bad boy? What's the status of the crack?

Don't know if this is real, but some claim that EA have had fake Facebook accounts to defend them, and then someone screwed up. Link to pic on a humor page: <a href="http://naurunappula.com/1050795/ea-on-paras-d-ja-drm-d" rel="nofollow">http://naurunappula.com/1050795/ea-on-paras-d-ja-drm-d</a><p>Could happen, and if true, a bit embarrassing. If not true, shows how people want to hurt them.

It sounds like the torrent version is going to be awesome when it comes out, all the features we want without the BS in the way.

The truly disappointing thing to me, was that I was really excited and looking forward to playing Spore. That is another Maxis game produced by EA that I've completely lost interest in because of the DRM. From the sound of it, I need to stay away from this one too. It is as though EA doesn't want my money.

I somehow saw this coming as recent as Sim City 4. But all in all, this is proving to be a good improvement, but a bad implementation. What is even the need of the online DRM? is this another of those: " Try to save billions of dollars from piracy, that do not exist " ?<p>I was planning to buy this game, now I don't.

Why does it have to be a warning to publishers? Clearly customers keep coming back or they wouldn't keep repeating the same idiotic behavior. I'm not sure I feel sorry for anybody in this case other than the guy who was such a non-gamer he never heard of DRM.

I have been waiting to pay and play this for months now, even to the point of upgrading hardware. I was even part of the Beta.<p>Well I am going to vote with my dollars and not buy it. Probably ever. If it worked offline it would have been a different story.

Ironic that this is happening on a game that's all about mitigating disasters.

Oi... Don't get me started. I loved when my cousin would bring his PC over and we would just sit there playing CnC, Diablo or SC in LAN. Now we have to go online for everything and there is frequently issues.

My experience of this article:<p>1) Read opening text 2) See container (presumably a video) with no explanation. I cannot load the video. 3) Read next paragraph to see what the video was about. No explanation. Close tab.

I predict that EA will cave-in to some extent and release a modified version of Sim City.<p>Let the game be used in the manner that the vast majority of your paying customers prefer, or suffer a major loss of reputation.

Perhaps its because I play MMOs and other online-only games, but the endless complaining about DRM and always-online play is getting a little boring.<p>What I have to wonder, though, is how they botched the launch so badly. They know when they are launching, they (should) roughly know how many users each server can support, and they should have a rough idea of how many games they are going to sale in the first few days.<p>How did they screw it up?<p>Is forecasting game purchases that inexact? I'd think you could derive a number at least close to being accurate from the amount of pre-sales, then multiply it by some factor to give yourself some safety. At the very least, you'd think there'd be contingency plans for quickly standing up new servers in response to demand.

They seem to have fixed most of the performance problems in the last couple days. Still not sure why they couldn't have done this correctly from the start, but it's at least not horrible now.

I also miss the days when you could just start up a BF2 server on your LAN and have your family and friends join the game for some fun.

Am I the only one who has no problem with always-online DRM? In what situations don't you have internet nowadays?

Is the game any good?

2591 1 star ratings of 2805 total LOL!<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-Limited-Edition-Pc/dp/B007FTE2VW/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-Limited-Edition-Pc/dp/B007FTE2...</a><p>I'm thinking this fail may be so epic it can kill always-on-DRM forever, force EA to back up on their customer-pissing force-feeding stuff like this<p>I'm not in the gaming industry, but launch is probably the most important event and, with this, they fucked the launch of one of the most adored, famous and known PC game franchises of the World<p>Firstly, the game reviews will suffer forever(that amazon rating is probably NEVER cease to be 1 star [unless EA starts paying chinese to do that too]), that must cost sales<p>Secondly and most important, word-of-mouth must account for A LOT of game sales, the hype of your friends, co-workers talking about a game must be the reason for most of non-hardcore-gamers sales... I, for example, only bought Diablo 3 because all my co-workers wouldn't shut about getting it, even tho I was a hardcore gamer in the past, played Diablo and Diablo 2, I wouldn't buy if it wasn't for the hype... people are PISSED and EA is probably losing a ton of money because of it<p>I'm almost certain this DRM will ultimately cost them considerably more than piracy would take, it's perfect!<p>As we say in Brazil: Time comes and the whip hits your own ass!