Business Gaming

EA’s Bad Week – the SimCity Saga Thus Far

Comments (2)
  1. Mikey says:

    Always on DRM is a bad bad idea. Terrible idea… but really only for the consumer. It also allows them to sell microtransactions, which for a single-player game is just complete and utter bullshit. Want a great sword? Give us some $$!

    Every time my network slows to a seaming halt or I lose connection I think "Gee… I hope someone wasn't playing Diablo 3 just now." And now I can add SimCity to the list. I haven't heard of this debacle yet, but I'm not shocked. EA makes it even less shocking.

    I keep thinking of the eventuality of the server shutdowns, too… I can go ahead and boot up anything off of GoG or what have you… but this means that SimCity's or Diablo 3's servers WILL SOME DAY SHUT DOWN. Not only is it bullshit now, but the games officially have a future sunset date, which will be bullshit then, too.

    I'm addicted to Steam, but I like Steam's method. Buy it from us for cheap, download it using our servers, we'll check the DRM *on first launch*, and then anytime after YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE ONLINE TO PLAY YOUR GAME. They have incentives, like being online you get achievements or the use of their chat system. Of course if Steam sunsets… well I just don't want to think about that right now…

  2. tushar says:

    Adobe ran into a similar issue recently – the thing where everyone was saying they were giving away Creative Suite CS2 for free. In actuality they were giving their existing CS2 users product keys that didn't require server activation because they were retiring their CS2 activation servers. I don't know if if they're going to take a page out of that book but whatever plan they have for sunsetting, IF ANY, they should really make public.

    unless they pull the BS where "you don't own the game, you bought a license you can use until we no longer support it."

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