EA's Servers Choke on SimCity > lost revinew

reply to cpsycho

Re: lost revinew

There's nothing more frustrating than pouring your heart and soul into a product, only for a large number of folks to steal it. I don't care for the DRM, but I can understand why EA decided to go this route.

There are some quirks. The fact their architecture doesn't load your city across vservers (I'm assuming they are using heavy virtualization, or sharding) is totally novice. At the very least, a city should be stored on a global DB that all vservers access. It would require a lot of error checking, but really, it seems like they took this route to get the game out faster. It definitely needs some work, but it should definitely improve over time.

Expect to see it more and more in the industry.

reply to Crookshanks
After enough time goes by, they'll simply drop support for the game. This happened to me many years ago (1997 when online only games were fairly rare - Ultima Online being one of the other few) with the game Sole Survivor (from the C&C universe). It was simple but fun and one day Westwood Studios decided to shut down their servers (after only a couple years I think) and I haven't been able to play it since.

reply to Time
The last video game I brought prior to this one was DEFCON, designed and published by a small outfit that can ill afford losses to piracy. They designed the game without any obnoxious DRM and certainly didn't cripple it to the point that you need a constant internet connection to play by yourself against the AI.

Let's compare EA to another large corporation that deals with losses on a daily basis: Wal-Mart. They don't ignore loss prevention, in fact they invest considerable sums into it. What they don't do is take it to an extreme that utterly ruins the shopping experience for the 99.9% of their customers that aren't criminals.

Besides, this isn't just DRM. The "game" is essentially little more than a dumb terminal, with everything happening on the server. It's basically the card catalog terminal from your library in 1993. It was a stupid design decision, maintaining the servers on an going basis will cost EA money, so in the long term they'll either shut them down or start charging for a game you've already paid for. Either way they alienate all their users. Perhaps they'll release a patch but I doubt it, the whole game was built from the ground up as a dumb terminal.

reply to Time

reply to Time
By far the most effective way to prevent piracy, IMO, is by making the non-pirated product superior to the pirated one. And the most effective way to do this? Implement a community that all players, whether single or multi-player, want to participate in. Not the "EA social community" which largely consists of Facebook spam, obtrusive promotions to other games, and celebrity appearances, but a genuine, non-commercial (as much as possible) endeavor. Just to name some examples: Battle.net, the Garry's Mod community, Supreme Commander's modding community, etc etc. Let the community (and associated user contributions, modding support, patches, expansions) reside behind online access validation. In turn, strip all that validation from the game itself. Bingo, pirates now have an inferior product that they can't rectify by "releasing cracks" or all that other business. And would be users that download the (totally working) pirated copy play, but then realize all the stuff that they're missing, giving even more incentive to buy the actual game.

The only con, of course, is dealing with idiots posting in forums with "HELP I PIRATED (insert your game), WHY CAN'T I PLAY MOD X?" But that can be entertaining, at times. Bonus points if they get banned 5 minutes later.

People are simply following the laws of economics, after all.