I feel bad for the game devs who got to see their hard work turn into something they don't intend.
I suppose this is a great advertising technique for small firms, startups, indie shops, etc. "Don't want this[http://amazon-pulls-sim-city] to happen? Work for our small team. We won't destroy your work."
I know it's standard to say "you get a part in the decisionmaking process!" That's part of it. But a lot of people are willing to let go of the big decisions if they get to be a part of something great. But they have to trust that it will come out well in the end.
EA has a reputation for being more akin to a sweatshop than a place where passionate people work on things they love, and it's been that way for many years now.
I do feel bad for anyone who works in that type of environment, but I don't think many (if any) of their employees are under the impression that their work will be lauded by adoring fans. Gamers resent everything that EA stands for -- especially their constant profiteering and manipulation -- and begrudgingly buy their games because they're one of the few companies with the budget to create AAA titles.
Takeover by EA is usually considered a death knell for game studios...
> "Takeover by EA is usually considered a death knell for game studios..."
Further to this point: Maxis, makers of Sim City, were notable for a long time as being the glaring exception when it came to EA's habit of buying and squeezing studios to death.
But the writing was on the wall when THE SIMS hit so big and was.. "exploited"[1] so heavily.
And when Will left... well, it's just flat-out inconceivable that anyone remained naive about what EA was going to get up to.
That's slightly revisionist history. EA bought Maxis when they weren't in great financial shape (it didn't help that basically every Friday was spent at the bar). It's true that the Sims was a huge success that EA didn't anticipate (they repeatedly tried to kill the project), but the jury is still out if Maxis would have survived long enough to release it without EA's funding and support.
I wasn't remotely talking about money; about why Maxis sold, whether they had to or anything along those lines. You're projecting an argument I never made.
I'm talking purely about the games and the people who make them.
EA buys studios and squeezes them. Why the studios subjected themselves to it is irrelevant to the fact that it happened. Repeatedly. Pretty much non-stop since Trip walked out the door. EA's long-standing treatment of their employees and the properties they owned, in the pursuit of a release schedule that burned out both in short order, is not revisionist history. It is EA's history.
EA bought Maxis when they weren't in great financial shape
I'm not familiar with the specifics, but if Maxis was in such dire straits, why did Wright become the largest shareholder of EA as a result of the takeover? And his partner became CEO for a while.
> The company's IPO took place in 1995. In 1997, after
> setbacks on a series of secondary titles, Braun and
> Wright sold Maxis to Electronic Arts for US$120
> million in stock. The deal made Braun the largest
> shareholder in EA at the time.
Not Wright, but a result of the purchase.
Also from Wikipedia[2]:
> Maxis went public in 1995 with revenue of US$38 million.
> The stock reached $50 a share and then dropped as Maxis
> posted a loss. EA bought Maxis in June 1997.
and
> It was a difficult idea to sell to EA, because
> already 40% of Maxis's employees had been laid
> off.
I remember when The Sims was first announced, where Maxis was saying "And most of the game isn't even done yet. We've got loads of new stuff we'll release for free online!" which turned into dozens of boxed expansion packs.
Yet they do keep buying, year after year. They want the polish of AAA EA titles as compared to indie fare, and they're willing to bend over to get it.
Its the whole consumer versus content producer battle in a microcosm, and it doesn't make consumers look good. It's easy to get away with being a shitty company like EA when people line up to get "Madden" versus some non-branded sports game.
Westwood was failing and wasn't going to survive on it's own. It's a sad fact but EA bought them up in order to save the franchises and the jobs of many developers.
My own personal anecdote is that most of my Bay-Area game-industry contacts were at Maxis: around 8-9 of them. And precisely none of them are still with EA today. Some have left to freelance, some to do indie games, some to do regular tech jobs outside the game industry entirely (e.g. would rather work for Lockheed than EA).
Whoa, Lockheed. Talk about a complete shift in career(s)...though I suppose programming UAVs is in some perverse way reminiscent of game programming. :)
Thankfully so... I once ran an Ohio-class SSBN aground in a channel in a loss-of-all-possible-NAVAIDS casualty. Luckily it was in a simulator (unluckily, our bosses were there to see it happen).
You can't navigate through "the doglegs" by shooting an azimuth to the sun, that would take too long, it would be safer to DR through on a stopwatch.
Either way though, hard to shoot an accurate azimuth when heavy fog miraculously rolls in out of nowhere and limits visibility to ~100 ft from the bridge. :)
I guess you did say a loss of all navaids though. The sextant was probably used for a bottle opener and broken or something.
> Either way though, hard to shoot an accurate azimuth when heavy fog miraculously rolls in out of nowhere and limits visibility to ~100 ft from the bridge. :)
Well that part is easy. Follow Robert Duvall's advice and call in for a huge napalm strike to lift the fog. It is the smell of victory, right? ;)
Some places in EA are amazing places to work at. Others have challenges. They aren't the only game company that has seen studios do sub-standard work after being acquired.
This isn't the first time EA has seriously blown a launch due to infrastructure issues I realize. EA's main infrastructure server team runs things like a pre-dotbomb forture 5.
I'm slow to throw blame since EA's acquisitions chose to join EA. Technical Directors at Maxis are just as much to blame as well as product/project managers that fail to squeeze load testing into the busy schedule.
I do (sadly) agree that studios seem to lose their magic to us gamers once they join EA. Why?
Not quite correct. Maxis' shareholders decided to join EA; I doubt the average programmer, or even the average project manager or tech lead had any say in the process whatsoever.
Sucked might be taking it a little far. Though it didn't work well as a game, the editors they created were really, really good. A very nice combination of user friendly and just powerful enough for creativity.
One of my biggest disappointments with the games industry is that those editors never really made their way into the industry at large. One of my greatest hopes after Spore launched was that some company would license those editors and actually build a good game around them. A Dungeon-Keeperesque game with fully editable creatures and dungeon design was a particular dream. Sadly, it never really caught on, and Spore looks to be a mostly dead end.
Unfortunately, the citation link is dead on the article. I don't know if this answers your question about commercial success. Maybe someone knows more about this data point in context of the industry.
Kind of defeats the purpose of doing an AMA if you're not allowed to answer any of the interesting questions. I sympathise if that was the case, but people should remember what the second 'A' stands for.
If someone drove their car into a lake, you wouldn't be adding anything to the conversation if you said "The purpose of a car was to drive on the road, not to drive into the lake"
In a similar fashion, you don't really add information to the discussion when you make an analogous statement about the misuse of an AMA thread.
'the purpose of the AMA was to promote the game, not satisfy readers' questions, so they didn't answer questions that would reflect negatively on SimCity V.'
Would be:
'the purpose of the car was to drive on the road, not to drive into the lake, so they chose not to drive into the lake.'
Yes, the Ask Me Anything, does not get answers. I noticed this too when former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark was on recently. The AMA wasn't what I'd hoped for at all. Weak. When asked about Kim Dotcom saga the following appears: [–]HelenClarkUNDP[S] 229 points 12 days ago
While you can ask anything - don't expect me to dive back into Kiwi political debates! Been there, done that!
I trust you'll notice that my unreasonable labeling of Steko as "pro-government" for what he said mirrors the equally unreasonable labeling of Alex3917 as "anti-government" for what he said.
Isn't this just a technical error (bug) that is a game dev's (or infrastructure engineer's) responsibility? I understand the frustration at the DRM concept, but you can't blame this on the larger entity as a whole when it was likely just a bug in some code or a small oversight.
The point is that its a highly failure prone requirement with dire consequences. Imagine if you were designing a car and the Business Analyst told you that this car needed a constant internet connection at all times or else the engine would immediately cease injecting gas.
While you could blame the engineers for all the cars that died in the middle of highways, it'd be far more realistic to blame the Business Analyst for demanding such an arduous and failure prone requirement.
Engineers can only make things work to a point and after that some real world limitations need to be taken into account.
Isn't this just a technical error (bug) that is a game dev's (or infrastructure engineer's) responsibility?
Isn't mandating the constant involvement of otherwise unnecessary tech that is known to be error prone and unreliable just the result of a poorly thought out buisness requirement?
No, its not that simple either. Because they probably did think it out, knew they were choosing the riskier technical option and expect/expected failures to happen.
My read of the situation is that they expected the rest of the game to get a better reception overall and blunt the bad PR from the inevitable failures caused by the always-on/centralized aspects.
This isn't a bad thing. EA should fire all it's developers, designers, sales people, management, liquidate its assets and distribute the proceeds to its shareholders, and quietly go out of business.
Really, the tech guys that got laid off will almost certainly go to find better jobs. Almost by definition, since they won't be making games at EA anymore.
Diablo III was (I think -- not like I've played Sim City yet) worse because the online AH was built into the gameplay Imagine if WoW's loot had been designed so that raid loot would NEED to be traded via a real money AH with Blizzard taking a cut.
Of course for all we know Sim City will turn out to have that kind if BS too.
I'm voting with my dollars in this case. I'm a huge fan of Starcraft and I've decided not to get heart of the swarm. The Internet requirements for Diablo 3 and StarCraft are totally excessive. I'm about to go on a flight now and I would have loved to play either one. But instead, Apple gets my time and money this evening.
In Sim City case, part of the simulation is run at their servers. Even while playing a private region, lost of aspects of the simulation are affected by the 'world' (other players). So, it´s not _just_ a matter of DRM: online is part of the game (unfortunately).
The point is: did the developers decided to do it that way _because_ EA made online DRM mandatory for them, or they did think this way since t=0 ?
We´ll probably never know.
It's not a technical bug, but it's a deliberately made flaw - and it illustrates what will happen when after a couple of years they'll turn the servers off (The current list http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0L266ui... shows even games of 2011 disabled already), leaving the game that you "bought" useless.
Digital Restrictions Management = Defective by Design.
Steam also presents a risk, but it's at least actively working to make it less bad for the consumer:
1) You can play most of games offline if you have a flaky connection;
2) They don't have a standard practice of turning off servers to 'obsolete' games, unlike EA. The Steam games are expected to work as long as Steam itself works; but SimCity most likely won't work much longer after the next SimCity is released, as we can see from EA current practices.
EA is also actively working on making things less bad by provisioning more hardware and disabling "non-critical" features.
DRM is DRM. People only get angry when things don't work, with the occasional philosophical argument thrown in to prove a point after the fact.
Steam gets less hate only because their servers have better uptime, but the hate towards EA comes in the form of a philosophical argument about how DRM is fundamentally broken.
Ultimately I think users are pragmatic; if DRM stays out of the way they won't care, and that's by-and-large how Steam is for most people. They also seem to focus on value-add items, such as being able to install (easily!) on multiple computers, operating systems, etc., whereas EA and other companies seem to provide more pain than pleasure. If a company appears to be trying to help people, they'll lovingly hand over their money. If a company seems to be only interested in their wallets, twitter and message boards will not be kind.
Yes. My issue is that the unkindness towards this particular company (EA) comes in the form of a philosophical argument about why DRM is fundamentally broken.
The main difference is that Steam's DRM, if it requires an online connection, only requires it in order to start the game up. Once you are in-game, you aren't booted from the game if you lose your connection while playing. That isn't the case when playing games like SimCity and Diablo 3.
Though, it SimCity's case it seems to be worse as I've heard people losing saves occasionally. I don't remember too many people losing characters when Diablo 3 launched.
On one side, valve's DRM is far less intrusive than EA's and on the other side valves efforts to curb piracy involves a lot more than just slapping DRM on. I remember a large post (interview?) where the gist was:
* Treat all markets equal and release the game at the same time. Not having access to a game that's released elsewhere is a huge driver of piracy.
* Support your games, release follow-up content.
* Actually make the DRM-Service a service: I can buy a game on steam and if there is a mac/windows/linux version, I can actually play all three of them.
It's all give and take. It's annoying that Steam games are DRM protected, but OTOH, I get added benefits. Just taking functionality from the user won't get you far.
People often buy slightly defective products when they're competitive in other features - that doesn't change the fact that any game would be a higher quality, more desireable product if the DRM was removed.
The "defective by design" refers to features unwanted by customer, but intentionally designed by manufacturer.
Examples in the physical world are specific short-lived parts in consumer appliances to reduce their longevity and increase sales - as it's better for manufacturer if a washing machine lasts 5 years but not 10; or new printers being sold with half-full cartridges to facilitate sales of replacements. Quite useful to the producer, but nonetheless despiceable.
That is not true of all Steam games. Some games that rely on Steamworks will fail when they lose connection. Others have no real DRM at all. The executables can be run completely independent of Steam.
Spend a year or more in a local without consistent internet access and Steam's solution is not nearly as rosy. Putting Steam in offline mode requires that your first make an internet connection to cache. Even then after a few days, the cache expires and you have to be able to connect again.
a) When it was in beta, there was presumably much less server load.
b) The fact that a small bug in the unnecessary server/DRM part of the game could take the whole game down like this is precisely the point. You can certainly blame the whole entity for deciding to require a net connection and a server even for single-player use of the game.
I don't know about this specific instance, but from what I recall from working in the video game industry, devs don't deal with copy protection; it's something that's done prior to mastering where they put your executable through SecuROM or whatever and it spits out a new binary that has copy protection/CD checks/online auth or whatever junk the publisher wants to add.
This isn't the case here. The game does significant processing on their servers, to make it useless as soon as they turn their servers off, which AFAIK they haven't promised to keep up any certain amount of time.
Thanks for the clarification; it's pretty awful of them to have them have this copy protection mechanism and fail to allocate enough server resources for people to be able to play the game they legitimately purchased.
It sounds as if some random MBAs said that they really need that server-side undefeatable copy protection, then balked at the price of actually purchasing enough resources for it and decided to skimp on that.
I'd put good odds that server allocation was a very high level decision balancing the expected backlash
They knew Amazon rating / word of mouth is going to put a massive hit on the LaunchDay+1 sales anyways, so what do they care if it actually works once you've handed over your cash?
No, it actually doesn't sound like some random MBAs.Are you one of those guys that blame MBAs for everything?The truth is we don't know what actually happened there.We'll have to wait for EA's reply on this one.It will be hard for them to recover after a huge mistake/strategy like this.
If EA's usual response to criticism means anything, we'll be waiting a loooooong time...
>It will be hard for them to recover after a huge mistake/strategy like this.
You're kidding, right? They'll just release Call of Modern Madden 5: Battlefield Part 2 and the fanboys will eat it up, horrid DRM and microtransactions and all.
If the reviews and reaction to the last Medal of Honor are anything to go by, people are finally getting tired of that old rehashed formula. The next CoD may not be as successful as the previous installments were.
You make a really good point. Rereading my comment, it's brusque.
I still think there's a point to be made about trust in a larger organization, but as someone who a) doesn't know precisely what the specific problem is and b) doesn't know whether I wouldn't have made the same mistakes, I'm going to acquiesce.
Effective DRM is less about technology, and more about incentives. It would not even be hard to implement if the sole goal is to maximize revenue. Sadly, most DRM schemes has a secondary goal of control rather than revenue maximization.
So how would this work:
1) have a early launch code included in collector versions and pre-order, for something around 1 week.
2) include a special DRM system for only the pre-launch week, and announce that it will be removed after the pre-launch week.
the benefits:
1) Crackers are people, and there is little incentives for 1 week crack. A honor system could also encourage them to avoid cracking the game, if this model is made in honest.
2) Buyers are people, and those that would buy the game at launch (90-95% of revenue) will not have a pirate game to pick from.
3) pirates are people, and those that rather wait for a crack will wait here too.
Maybe the case for non EA games, but considering people won't get to play Simcity within the next 2 weeks or so, there'll be a cracked version out by then. EA have brought themselves nothing but trouble in this situation and being the out-of-touch company they are, they deserve every loss of sale they get.
While this might sound as a big problem for crackers, I slightly doubt it. I suspect many crackers has related day-jobs, like reverse engineers. If their day jobs require them to reverse engineer the command structure of a bot net, or make deep package inspection rules for protocols, then reverse engineer a game server is not that complicated thing to do. They are going to have special made tools for this.
Reverse engineering the binaries and network protocols is not going to be so difficult. What would be more time consuming is reverse engineering the mathematical models used for simulation on the backend, you're going to need to observe the input->output map over a lot of possible inputs and to do that you probably need a lot of game clients connected which cost a lot of money. Not to mention not having your fuzzer detected and being banned/sued.
You might be able to eventually do a good enough job that makes your server feel quite close to the official server but then every time the game updates you either have to stick with the old way or do all of your analysis again. So you end up with a divergence between the real game and the pirate game.
It is certainly much more time consuming than figuring out how to set the "isGameValid" in securom to 1 and breaking every securom game out there. In this case you have to individually reverse engineer every single game out there, so at some point you hit the limit of the rescources that game crackers will spend on cracking. Essentially the problem with traditional DRM is that attack is easier than defence, this inverts that relationship.
Some games, WOW for example have people spending significant resources on reverse engineering them (although for different reasons) because there is a financial incentive to do it (you can make money selling rare items). There probably isn't much money in cracking simcity.
> key parts of the game logic and performed server side so you would need to reimplement the server in order to crack it
But game runs just fine for twenty minutes after disconnect (at least it simulates one city fine). You just may lose your progress because game saves "in the cloud".
This is the problem though. Their always on DRM doesn't work, they obviously didn't have enough servers to handle the load even though they would have had sales figures before the game launched. Maybe if they launched the game with enough infrastructure to cope, there would be no issue here. As pointed out somewhere else, Blizzard have done this with their last few games; Stacraft 2 (both) and Diablo 3 and people don't complain (even though at the start there were a few teething issues).
I understand the SaaS description, it's a very accurate one but the point is customers have paid for something that is essentially an overpriced server status and countdown application. This is not acceptable, it's not like the game was given away for free. People have paid for something they cannot use.
How would you feel if you just bought a new car, drove it out of the dealership and found-out it had some amazing new technological anti-theft GPS immobiliser in your car that always needed to be connected to the monitoring company network and it was preventing you from driving it out of the dealership? The dealership refuse to refund your money even though they knew the car had this issue, but they sold it anyway so you have to wait for a fix... EA sold us a lemon, I feel very ripped off.
Do EA even test their games any more or do they just develop them, throw some really buggy DRM implementation in and sell as many copies as possible? They're already one of the most hated companies in gaming, I guess they can't really lose out any more, they hit rock bottom a while ago. Much like the music industry, they'll eventually start losing copious amounts of cash and blame piracy instead of themselves. So tired of EA's crap.
Do we need a new acronym for games that required black-box server side components (Not just DRM but entire chunks of game code) not controlled by the consumer?
GaaS? (Game as a Service)?
Ubisoft did the same thing with the last silent Hunter game IIRC.
This is hardly a new concept, Eve Online is a fairly prominent example of a game that is run entirely as a subscription service. I'm sure there are other MMO games that do the same, however there are others like World of Warcraft which combine a subscription service with a "boxed" game client.
In the context of the current discussion, I think EA could have made the new SimCity game entirely service based, like Eve, giving the client software as a free download and charging for access to the server, where most/all of the actual simulation logic would live. Instead they've pulled a bait-and-switch with a boxed product.
>Work for our small team. We won't destroy your work.
A small team might not. However, they also won't have the resources typical a larger triple-A product either. Nor will your game have a marketing team behind it to draw gamer attention with.
Without that, your game has to have a combination of cleverness and buzz. The latter requires a certain degree of luck.
>I suppose this is a great advertising technique for small firms, startups, indie shops
You mean like all those small valley startups creating Rails web apps that only work when the user has an internet connection? I don't see the difference.
This is not a web site, it's a game. It is marketed and sold as a game.
It isn't even being marketed/sold as an MMO. For the most part, people think this is a single player experience with some multiplayer interactions.
I haven't seen the retail packaging, but does it even state an internet connection is required? And if so, is it prominent?
EDIT: According to the shot on Amazon[1], it does at least state that a "persistent internet connection [is] required to play". Not excusing them by any means, but that's better than what I was expecting from the likes of EA.
Mayyybe I'm misreading your argument since I've read it about 5 times and am not sure if you're serious, but web apps need the web to work by design, why would a single player game need the web to work?
> why would a single player game need the web to work
For the same reason Siri needs a connection to work: there's a lot of heavy processing going on, which your client device just couldn't handle even if it wanted to, that is being offloaded to a cluster somewhere instead. In Siri's case, it's linguistic analysis; in SimCity's case, it's inter-city traffic-flow, economy, and other expansive high-granularity world-simulation tasks.
...or, at least, that's what EA's engineering claimed at some point. To still be charitable to them, but to temper this with pragmatism a bit, I don't think there's really that much difficult processing going on; I imagine it was more that high-end gaming PCs could run everything client-side, but the low-to-medium-end PC market--from which Maxis pulls the lion's share of its sales volume--couldn't.
Shoving the processing server-side means everyone can get the effect of throwing a 3GHz Xeon at their world-simulation, and the total amount of processing required can be decreased dramatically by using player's real cities to neighbor other real cities for inter-city world-sim calculations, instead of having to simultaneously synthesize the behavior of 8+ AI cities to interact with each real one.
To put it another way, I imagine it would be very hard to market a game where the core feature ("new, more granular, more realistic simulation!") degrades into non-existence on the average PC, thus rendering an upgrade from the previous version moot.
'web' apps are expected to work on the 'web'. It kind of goes without saying that it there is no network it can't make whatever calls it needs to in order to load data.
Games are not generally expected to require a network connection. If I take my laptop to the coffee shop without wireless I can still play Portal and Anno 2070.
Not so with the new SimCity.
Not to mention, there is an expectation that if you buy a game (especially on physical media) that you will be able to play it so long as your hardware supports it. I can still play Quake 3 for example.
With SimCity, if they ever shutter the servers or sunset the Online Service your game becomes nothing more than a pretty coaster.
While that is a valid general criticism of Steam, they do provide an offline mode, which the new Sim City does not. Personally I prefer Steam to the previous alternative of having to leave the CD in the drive, or using a dodgy no-cd patch - but that's getting off topic.
The DRM strategy in Sim City is not the same as Steam, and cannot really be compared. EA are forcing unnecessary always-online features into what most people expect to be a single player game, preventing it from being played offline at all, in a thinly veiled attempt to prevent piracy and resale. That would be bad enough, but what makes it utterly unacceptable is that they haven't provided the infrastructure to support it in the short term, and clearly don't have the business model required to support it beyond the first few years.
Why anyone would knowingly support this business practice at all is beyond me, let alone for a game which has had such dubious pre-release reviews and is now essentially unplayable.
No, you completely missed his point. His argument is that internet isn't immediately associated with games. So a web connection isn't implicit or explicit in playing a game.
I suppose this is a great advertising technique for small firms, startups, indie shops, etc. "Don't want this[http://amazon-pulls-sim-city] to happen? Work for our small team. We won't destroy your work."
I know it's standard to say "you get a part in the decisionmaking process!" That's part of it. But a lot of people are willing to let go of the big decisions if they get to be a part of something great. But they have to trust that it will come out well in the end.