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...
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.
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
Sources?
> 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.
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.
> It was a difficult idea to sell to EA, because
> already 40% of Maxis's employees had been laid
> off.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)
Yuck.
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.
http://www.shacknews.com/article/60839/new-images-of-maxis-c...
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. :)
> 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? ;)
I think the respective records of EA and a pre-EA Maxis ought to provide ample evidence of the likely culprit here.
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?
I'll give you one guess.
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(2008_video_game)
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.
Perhaps they were under legal obligation or pressure from EA, but I find it hard to feel sympathy.
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.'
Now if it was "Answer Me Everything"...
On the contrary, this is by far the most realistic simulation of working for government that's ever been created.
Things were clearly working when it was in beta.
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.
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.
Of course for all we know Sim City will turn out to have that kind if BS too.
that poor game's so predestined to be a blatant cash whore, almost makes you feel bad for it
Digital Restrictions Management = Defective by Design.
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.
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.
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.
The problem with EA then isn't DRM but badly implemented DRM.
* 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.
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.
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.
I'd probably place money on the fact they failed the load testing. (Yes, I'm xEA and was involved in the last simcity load test)
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?
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.
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.
"Spore" was 5 years ago, FWIW.
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.
They're not stupid, they know it's getting cracked. It's just a play for more time.
Think of it like trying to get a "crack" for 37s Basecamp or similar.
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.
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".
SimCity isn't a normal game, it's a SaaS game.
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.
When I was talking about GaaS I was sarcastically talking about ostensibly single-player games are crippled in this way.
Crippleware is a good one too :)
I was also thinking about PC Games mainly when I said that since it still (touch wood) a rare situation.
To be honest, mobile gaming didn't even appear in my PC-master-race-gaming mind :p
Yay! The Big-Enterprison teaches the youth VERY effectively why it scks by destroying their fun* with games ... this time: Simcity.
Is this "disaster" some sort of an ideological paradox intervention?
How bad can this get? I mean how do you manage to fail at such scale with a brand like this. Don't they need the money anymore? Don't they want it?
Interesting.
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.
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.
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.
[1]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/815mDnNUDhL._SL1121_.j...
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.
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.
Unless you bought Portal on Steam and didn't sign in when you had an internet connection.
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.
I simply said comparing this to a web app is not apples-to-apples.
But it's not even implicitly understood that a game need a web connection. It's not part of its integral operation. Why would it be?
TL;DR: Things on the internet obviously need a web connection. Things not directly related to the internet...shouldn't need one.
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.