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In any case, there's a veritable army of highly motivated, highly qualified people who are going to do everything in their power to crack it.

I disagree. Cracking this game to allow it to run in SP offline mode still means someone paid for the game in the first place.

The REAL way to win is to quit buying games from EA. There are plenty of companies out there that are worth your attention, after all.

Edited 2013-03-12 23:56 UTC

I agree but you have to wonder at content makers who cripple their work so that the pirate versions are in every way superior to the legitimate product. Then are shocked that their product is pirated.

Greed seems to make folk stupid.

You don't have a right to pirate it, though. If you don't like it, don't buy it. You don't have a God Granted Right to run SimCity. If you think that as it is, it is shit, but it could become better by sprinkling some pepper on it, well, that will not be your problem unless you buy it.

Now, if you buy it, I think it is ethical (though not necessarily legal) to modify it to suit your needs.

Not only that, but piracy still gives EA mindshare.

Only talk about how it sucks, and focus on the DRM. Don't buy it, don't pirate it, and discourage others from buying it or pirating it.

I disagree. I believe this is already happenning and is actually the cause of the problem.

1. People are pissed off with EA for some intrusive DRM and stop buying their games.
2. EA says "Oh noez, sales are down, it must be all of those pirates."
3. Increasingly obnoxious DRM "to combat pirates".
4. GOTO 1


I am not pretending to have a solution. I think that in the long run, the only developers left will be those who respect their customers... it just might take a while and the transitory period will be tough.

Edited 2013-03-13 08:40 UTC

I will definitely invest in that game.

What about forking an OSS game like simultrans and extend it to something better than SimCity?

Quite simply it costs money. Pure Open source gaming, as a whole, is quite inferior to their commercial counterparts. Commercial gaming companies use commercial products that has licensing costs that far exceeds an ordinary person's budget. We're talking programs such as Autodesk's Maya, Qualoth, SideFx's Houdini, The Foundry's Nuke, and all the other smalltime outfits that have special niche SW for modelling lighting, animation, and rendering, etc.

In the case of a successful Sim City clone, just to enable the multiplayer aspects, you'll need hosting, maintenance, paid staff to maintain, etc. So the costs are steep.

I would encourage an open source hybrid game. The software is free, but to access the cloudbased multiplayer aspects, you would need paid access and closed source binary connector that would handle security, paid, non-intrusive ads, etc. The proceeds would encourage capitalism, while keeping the project and structure of the game alive. The same foundation can work on other games as well, since games come and go like a fart in the wind. I know I may be missing some more aspects of game making, but the jist of it are there. This is not to discourage the investigation of open source games. Some are quite good, such as Xonotic (Formerly Nexuiz). But the fact of the matter is, that in order to create games that are on par with commercial counterparts, would require a professional infrastructure, SW, resources, management, workflow, etc. The work would also have to be done in an efficient, and expedient manner, since the pace of gaming fads change so frequently.

My point was mainly to steer developers efforts from "piracy" to legal OSS work. I agree it is a lot of work, but not unlike linux. Take a look at ManaWorld, it will surprise you what a community can achieve. It is not 3D but still quite fun MMORPG to play with a great community behind it.

Sure Mana Word is "satisfactory" or even "good". But can it hold a candle to the current commercial offerings? Until such games can, they will Never sway the masses to turn their attention away from their commercial DRM crippled, counterparts. I never said that it can't be done. All that it will take is a Mark Shuttlesworth of gaming to initiate and bankroll a project of such a magnitude.

And the developers in question are good at hacking on x86 asm to disable DRM.

Great if you're trying to disable DRM, horrible if you want an artist or a story writer or something like that.

As a youngster, Popular games were from Sierra, such as Space Quest, Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc. And in the IT field, Unreal (Original) and Unreal Tournament...

When I feel nostalgic, I can fire up a DOS emulator, pare down my CPU, and play the old game. I can still play Unreal Tournament with my friends with my old Mods, etc. Young people now, do not have that kind of future under always n DRM. Once their game is EOL'd, new tech introduced, their game that they've PURCHASED and enjoyed is gone forever. Right now, a person can rationalize that you can move on to newer games, but as someone with a few years under my belt, you WILL get nostalgic and want to play your favorite games with your choice of hard liquor or beer and junk food. That is yet another area that DRM fails modern gamers.

Did anyone ever really want multi-player simcity? I don't.

Although just ditching multiplplayer reduces the complexity and effort from "completely insane" to "Mostly insane".

How about beating the addiction for computer games or 24 hour stimulation?

Then, you'd be satisfied with playing unencumbered games and won't bother with games from companies that give customers a big finger.

You realize you're kind of questioning werecalfs entire way of life. Anyone who has invested that much of their life in gaming, isn't going to admit that they're terribly terribly wrong and have wasted most of their life. Its like trying to explain why quantum mechanics is right to plato. Yes, you're right, but you aren't going to get admission from the person you're arguing with that you are.

The system is designed to stop piracy, it has nothing to do with needing servers to offload processing.

She's just giving a p.r. line.

I think you failed Sarcasm 101.

Because Lucy Bradshaw got told by the head of game development that was the case.