So, SimCity has been released – the fifth instalment in this venerable series of fantastic games. However, just as everyone suspected, the game has been completely ruined by the always-online DRM. So much so, in fact, that Amazon has ceased selling the game. Update: and it’s only getting worse – EA has suspended all marketing efforts for SimCity, and has asked third parties to do the same. Wow.
SimCity requires no introduction – from the first game onwards, it has captured the minds and hearts of gamers the world over. SimCity 2000 is my personal favourite, but I have played all versions to death. I was eagerly awaiting SimCity (no version number), but sadly, the game has been ruined even before it’s been properly released.
The game requires an always-on internet connection to connect with EA’s servers, partly because of online components, but mostly because of DRM. During a Reddit AmA with Maxis, the game’s developers, the problems were already predicted, and they panned out: EA’s servers couldn’t handle the load, and the game became unplayable for large groups of people who just paid €60 for the privilege.
They were greeted by waiting screens, unable to play the game.
EA had to act, and they did. They have released a patch which… Disables several features of the game. Ironically, it mostly disables features that supposedly required the always-on connection in the first pace, such as leaderboards and achievements. A more dramatic step is the removal of the ‘cheetah’ speed. This is the highest simulation speed in the game, and at least in the way I play the game I require it – I switch between pause (build mode) and cheetah (develop mode).
As a consequence of all the troubles with players being unable to, well, play, Amazon has decided to remove the digital version of the game from its virtual shelves, while the physical copy now carries a warning about the game.
I don’t think EA could have handled this any worse. None of the gameplay features require always-on connectivity; you can play the game entirely on your own. It’s this kind of – pardon me – shit that makes people hate you, EA. You just ruined SimCity.
The only thing, and I mean the only thing, companies will listen to is people spending money elsewhere.
If people keep paying for it – they feel like the sh** it tolerable, live DVD region coding, or the CD I bought kwhich doesn’t play on my kitchen cd player because of anti-piracy damage (looking at you Sony).
Edited 2013-03-07 22:55 UTC
No. This is ye olde conventional wisdom and it’s bullshit. The big-wigs at EA will try and screw you, and if you don’t pay for their stuff, the shareholders will lose out but the board will still get nice bonuses. In the absolute worst case that the company folds or even looks like it’s going south, those same people will leave and get a job at Activision or some other publisher and do exactly the same thing again.
Look at Zynga. It’s doing so badly now. Any lessons learnt at EA? Nope!
OTOH, budding nerd comedians can start their set with two words:
Sim City.
Maybe they’ll still pay the bonuses if we pull the rug from under them but that’d speed up their demise.
EA will keep swallowing up all we know and love (game wise that is) and turn it into an online only, pay to progress, DLC which should be part of the thing you paid for but is strangely ready at release crapfest… unless we stop feeding them with cash.
Here’s the list of online services EA have shut down
http://www.ea.com/1/service-updates
Some of these games are two years old, they were fleecing second hand buyers with charges to activate online play just weeks before they shut down FIFA 11 (even when challenged about the EU ruling which said they should transfer the licence, it was only talking to someone who still had their soul to sort it).
With EA you pay them for two years and then they want paying again for the next release whether you like it or not.
I’m not going to be mugged by them again, hopefully others don’t either.
Edited 2013-03-07 23:34 UTC
If you reward bad behavior, you’ll get more bad behavior.
People have been complaining about EA for years, but are still buying their products. The obvious lesson for EA is that treating customers badly leads to more sales. EA will not change until customers change.
I can’t believe how much crap people are willing to put up with in order to play a game. It’s a game! You don’t need it! I can understand putting up with mediocre or annoying software that you need to use to earn a living, but not for entertainment.
EA needs your money, you don’t need EA. Spend your money with someone who treats you right.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_yxUHDZTq0
(warning, contains the F word)
Pretty pissed off with the QA on Crysis 3.
I have a system that is more than capable of playing the game at high settings.
They either jump ship or turn to litigation to further punish their users.
If people do stop buying DRM-laden games, they’ll just blame declining sales on piracy, and try to squeeze harder.
“they’ll just blame declining sales on piracy”
I don’t care if they blame declining sales on the Easter Bunny. If people reject DRM and refuse to buy, someone will notice. If people reject buggy software and refuse to buy, someone will notice. It might not be EA, but others will notice.
The problem isn’t EA; EA is showing that crippled games can make money. If we don’t want DRM, we need to show that it hurts sales. EA has no reason to change if we keep giving them our money. If we don’t change our behavior, they won’t change theirs.
Steam does DRM right.
EA and UPlay are joining up because they can’t beat steam on the PC.
GoG.com is doing DRM right, Steam blows.
Never used GoG, but I’ve never had a problem with Steam.
Origin seems to work alright as well and so does uplay, It not as bad as people make out.
I have bought quite a few games from gog and gaming without DRM seems to be gaming without hassle.
Edited 2013-03-08 23:49 UTC
How so when it doesn’t keep the games from being pirated? What is right about it?
It does not work that way.
Let’s assume that a stunt like this reduces game sales by 50%, but people end up purchasing the game and its successors every 2 years instead of every 10 years (because the vendor is making minor tweaks to the server to entice people to upgrade, while dropping support for the old versions). The publisher now has a massively more profitable product, with a fraction of the sales.
If you look at past history, you’ll find that the hypothetical 50% will be a moot point anyway. Many of those people will end up accepting the changes as more and more vendors adopt them. The people who don’t end up accepting those changes won’t matter anyway since they will end up aging outside of the games target demographic, while more naive customers age into the target demographic.
And all of that assumes that the company listens to their customers and shrug off the comments for business reasons.
This needs to be a huge deal. It needs to crash and burn very loudly, very publicly. EA needs this corrective bit of blow back.
The always on DRM is bullshit and ruins the experience. A clear message needs to be sent that this is not tolerated.
theconsumerist.com has a worst company contest. EA won last year.
Ah, tradition. Nice that everything is familiar and unchanging.
There’s really no other way to put it. Hopefully everyone else stops selling the game as well.
With Blizzard and EA trying to wring all the juices out of original content there is really no reason to buy games like this. I have packed my xbox away and fully embraced Desura/Steam on my PC’s.
The game hasn’t been ruined; in fact, if you wait a few weeks, it’ll probably work just fine. Of course, I’m not advocating the DRM, but if you bought the game knowing that it was online-only, then you obviously didn’t hav a big ethical issue with it requiring an internet connection to play. In such a case, these botched launches are a pretty common occurance, so the best course of action would simply be to wait awhile for the problems to get sorted out before trying to play it. Otherwise, just boycott it altogether if it bothers you that much.
If these companies are going to insist that games like this be online-only, probably the best way to do it would be to have ‘staggered’ launches, where those who pre-order it get to play before everyone else. So you allow several thousand new players a day, and then you don’t have several million people slamming your servers on launch day. This could be esp useful for games such as MMORPGs that they know are going to be huge.
Well, yes – because the online requirement means it can’t actually be played under many of the circumstances where I’d like to play a game like that. Say, while sitting on a 12 hour flight, or while sitting on the bus/train to work…
They made an MMOCBG (that’s massively multiplayer online city building game) so no wonder. They do not say that on the box, though.
They screwed it up massively. People that preordered were reporting that their games would not unlock, while people that bought the game at launch got in immediately. So EA are to blame for every single bit. But it seems that they are doing a Blizzard here, again. The just like WoW, SimCity is a big investment. But at least you don’t have to pay each month… Though I’m pretty sure they would love to introduce that “feature”.
See TotalBiscuit on YouTube. He’s a gaming commentator, well known.
Arenanet did exactly this with Guild Wars 2. People that pre-ordered the game got access to betas and server stress tests pre-launch, and then they got a 3 day head start to play before the “official” release date.
So how did that work out?
I am one of the people who pre-ordered Guild Wars 2, mostly because I wanted to show support to someone who is willing to atleast try *something* new in the MMORPG-arena, but I can say that while the launch was smoother than most other MMORPGs these days it still wasn’t smooth enough. There was still quite a lot of lag in the beginning and lots of random DCs.
I didn’t buy it simply because of the crappy city size. But I must admit, this online only thing is a real problem. What happens when EA decides they no longer want to support those servers? Looks to me like the people who bought this game are out their money. Whereas those with previous SimCity titles will be able to play their favorite games for years to come.
Now is a great time to go to GOG
http://www.gog.com/gamecard/simcity_2000_special_edition
Would you rate the DOS version higher than the Windows version?
There are many great, cheap indie games around these days, I’ve been bitten by both Steam and Ubisoft’s UPlay in the past in a similar fashion (their server outages resulting in me not being able to play otherwise non-networked, single player games) and will not be buying any game with DRM in the future.
It’s a shame, because I’ll miss out on upcoming games like Dogs of War, and will never play another game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, but I will not reward bad behaviour with my money.
Surely, if it meets people’s (ex|sus)pectations, then marketing should view that as a successful launch.
Been tracking this since last year. It comes as no surprise and has played out exactly as I expected it would.
Thanks a lot EA, you had already ruined SimCity back in 2007, now you give us this?
I have no words to describe what has happened.
Looks like there is now a petition for buyers of the game to try and get a refund:
http://www.change.org/petitions/electronic-arts-100-refund-for-sim-…
not a broken server, which will be solved in a few days.
What has really ruined the game is that everything in the gameplay is made to force you to cooperate and go online. The maps are too small, they are much smaller than simcity 4’s one, and with today’s computer, you would expect the other way around, I want to build Paris, not a collection of town that are in its suburbs.
Just use the cracked version until the servers are properly working. I bet you know as well as everyone else where to look. And if not, google is your friend.
As much as I hate that software requires online mode, that’s not the real problem here. The problem is that they sold many more game tickets than there were seats at the “virtual stadium”. Like selling a million tickets for the superbowl stadium with capacity 82,566 seats.
A gradual rollout would have prevented this mess. Everyone who bought the game could get a date where they could start playing.
Yes, it is the very core of the problem. A gradual rollout wouldn’t be any less terrible, really.
I expect the following course of events: Buy game, install, play. Period. Not “Buy game, install, wait a day or two or maybe a month, oh and make sure to not be on a train because then you’re SOL”. I want to waste my time playing the game, not waiting for it.
Edited 2013-03-08 13:12 UTC
I was so excited about the new SimCity as I was a huge fan of the older versions. I was ready to buy the new version immediately but then I read about the small city sizes and now about not just the problems of the always connected model but the fact that you are being forced towards a multiplayer model which personally I don’t want to use.
Such a shame.
I am may still be tempted to give it a shot if they iron out some of the server bugs.
Seriously is there any series that hasn’t plunged on a downward trajectory under EA once their original developers have been bought?
Not even talking DRM. Gameplay either falters or becomes more and more generic with time.
One close to my heart is Mass Effect, Syndicate and Burnout also.
Even though I just spent $60 on simcity I am going to buy cities xl and be happy. I hate origin and I only installed it to get battlefield 3 and simcity. Cities xl is on steam, the best digital distribution platform, and it is only $30. Hopefully I can get a refund from EA without joining a class action suit.
it’s so stupid it must be true
http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1140452-rumour-ea-hires-chinese-s…
I can confirm that I have first hand experience of companies doing this kind of online “influencing” .. be it in forums, shopoing site reviews, etc …
Seriously – it happens. For real.
…and not much more can be said.
– “Stupid people buy stupidly stupid things to stupid ones.”
Frankly, as Uma Thurman said : « Hey, what did you expect? »(tm)
Ok I shut-meep- and go play Minecraft(c)… 😉
I am done with EA. I am going to ship every EA title I have back to them. State I am done with your company’s disgusting lack of ethics. Untrusting nature of your paying customers. I want nothing to do with you. If you try to mail me anything, I will mark it return to sender.
I will implore others to do the same.
Everyone needs to stop playing SimCity. Even if you can’t return it, just stop playing. I know it hurts because I really wanted to play it myself but long as it is an EA property I refuse to do anything with it.
I had already contacted the media (all of the major news outlets in NYC) as this needs to be spoken about on the air. EA needs to be embarrassed more than the almost 3,000 one star ratings. Kip needs to be publicly fired!