Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

Re:Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues by jfim on Thursday March 07, 2013 @04:20PM (#5340341)

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.

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Re:Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues by mrgoldenbrown on Thursday March 07, 2013 @04:24PM (#5340369)

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.

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Re:Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues by jfim on Thursday March 07, 2013 @04:55PM (#5340585)

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.

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Re:Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues by fooey on Thursday March 07, 2013 @10:28PM (#5341930)

"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?

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Re:Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues by Cardeck1 on Thursday March 07, 2013 @05:06PM (#5340666)

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.

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Re:Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues by Karunamon on Thursday March 07, 2013 @05:17PM (#5340731)

>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.

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Re:Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues by Fargren on Thursday March 07, 2013 @06:03PM (#5340979)

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.

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Re:Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues by bsg75 on Thursday March 07, 2013 @05:25PM (#5340773)

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

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