A social feature that isn't even relevant in solo play. You shouldn't need a network for single play.

The idea here is to force you to be reliant on the network; to move the processing onto their servers.

SimCity isn't a normal game, it's a SaaS game.

This is the problem though. Their always on DRM doesn't work, they obviously didn't have enough servers to handle the load even though they would have had sales figures before the game launched. Maybe if they launched the game with enough infrastructure to cope, there would be no issue here. As pointed out somewhere else, Blizzard have done this with their last few games; Stacraft 2 (both) and Diablo 3 and people don't complain (even though at the start there were a few teething issues).

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.

SaaS Game, very well put!

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.

>> SaaS Game ... (Game as a Service)

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.

I was excluding MMOs from the above since the expectations of those are that they are multi-player and subscription based.

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 :)

80% of mobile games are already precisely this, without requiring the coinage of a special term for it.

I was being facetious when I said it.

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