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.

No, its not that simple.

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.

Yep. There were probably tech guys who said you shouldn't do it, but the tech guys that said you can probably got the promotions.

It kills me a little inside to know this is probably 100% correct.

It's actually very unlikely. What is likely is that all the tech guys will be laid off because SimCity didn't meet financial expectations.

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.

Also known as the Diablo III strategy.

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.

WoW + RM:AH = Titan

that poor game's so predestined to be a blatant cash whore, almost makes you feel bad for it

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.

isn't Steam also DRM and hugely successful and very popular with the gaming community?

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.

I'm not sure you can call DRM "Defective by Design" then. It works for Valve and they are making a lot of money by stifling piracy with it.

The problem with EA then isn't DRM but badly implemented DRM.

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.

Doing a massive online game takes a broad skillset and different development patterns than single player.

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)

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.

but the beta had the same issues, they were never fixed before release.

Absolutely right, you could totally see this train wreck coming.

http://imgur.com/xddfMvh

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.

"fail" makes it sound accidental

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.

>We'll have to wait for EA's reply on this one.

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.

It does. Do game developers implement DRM when not required to by the bean counters?

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.