Fuck you EA! Thanks for stealing my money and ruining Simcity

The BBQ Pit
61

I can’t believe I’m not buying a new SimCity, but… yeah, I’m not buying the new SimCity.

That said, if it was just the online thing, but the game was an improvement over previous iterations, I could live with it. However, that and the “tiny little city that has to work in a region, and we took out terraforming and stuff” things add up to “no, thanks.”

This is a case, I think, of the bad side of game development. On one hand you can give the fans what they want; on the other, you can innovate, and invent something they didn’t know they wanted. Maxis seems really, really obsessed with making their games “interactive” and just like The Sims. You can understand why, in that The Sims sold a billion copies. They made more from that game than all the other games they’ve ever made combined.

But a lot of hardcore SimCity fans don’t WANT The Sims. They want more SimCity; they want an improved version of the game they’ve played before. I hoped, against hope, that SimCity 5 was going to combine the ease of SimCity 3000 with the fun of SimCity 2000 with the nifty tools of SimCity 4, so that I could build a really huge, awesome city with cool stuff in it. Apparently that’s not allowed; you have to build little interconnected towns, preferably by playing with other people. If ten million people enjoy that I think that’s awesome and hope the bugs get worked out and they emjoy it but I’ll wait for someone else to make an actual city building game.

The fact that EA/Maxis are lying about a lot of the game happening server-side - does anyone really believe that nonsense? - doesn’t really bother me. Companies bullshit the customer, it’s a fact of life. It just doesn’t look like a very fun game.

62

Don’t you still need something to do, you know, after?

63

The problem is the issue of piracy.

If it wasn’t for SimCity being an online only, service oriented game, there would be NO SimCity. Period.

EA would not have invested the millions to develop and market the game, because their investors would have been all - “Are you crazy?”.

It’s sad, but true. PC is a pirate paradise. It’s fine for small indie devs to have their games pirated to hell and back. They can still make lots and lots of money because their games don’t cost 50+ million dollars to make.

AAA exclusive PC games with significant offline components will continue to be scarce. Some AA games will be able to pull it off, but no way will we see the likes of a DeusEx, or Thief, or the old SimCity without the game either being a multi-platform game or be online only.

PC gamers need to support the types of games that offer offline components, instead of pirating them. For all the talk on forums and twitter, and facebook when Diablo 3 came out, about how everyone was going to play TorchLight 2 instead of D3 - well Diablo 3 sold over 12 million copies (and is still free of pirating) and torchlight 2 sold about 1 million in the same amount of time (and was pirated to hell and back).

So investors at EA will look at that and say, what exactly?

64

Bullshit.

Piracy is what they cry about, but, much like the RIAA, the numbers don’t match very well, and tend to make the usual mistakes of “everyone who downloads a copy of the game would have paid $60 for it.”

The used-games market, however, is massive. Gamestop is more of a problem than the Pirate Bay ever has been or ever would be. So they cry “piracy” while taking steps that just so happen to make used game sales that much harder.

65

Hmmm, didn;t really address the topic of SimCity’s launch specifically.

As I said, online only may be a necessary evil. I don’t like it, but I understand it. However, if you’re goign to do it, you gotta do it right. there is no doubt here that Maxis and EA fucked up, royally. It’s almost as if they never heard of Diablo 3. How do you not make damn sure you have enough servers to meet demand? you know how many pre-orders there were, you must have had a clue as to how many people would try to log in on release day. You don’t wait until a week passes before you say you’re adding more servers, you add more servers BEFORE the issues arise.

The incompetence shown here is beyond anything I expected. Even Diablo 3 didn’t have server issues this bad, for this long. I tried logging into the doper region last night, and I still ran into problems!

It’s specially bad for PC gaming as a whole. This game transcends the typical gaming market. I have an uncle who I haven’t spoken to in years, and who has never mentioned gaming to me (outside of a poker game), who called me up out of nowhere, asking me for help in getting a PC that could play SimCity.

Now, these people’s first experience with PC gaming, or at least, their first in a long time, is completely marred by this disaster. I’ve heard many people essentially say: “Well, if this is PC gaming, I’m not coming back!”

That is extremely damaging. PC gaming doesn’t have a mega corporation marketing it, promoting it, protecting it from bad press. We pretty much lost what could have been a fresh new pool of PC gamers that might have tried something else on the Origin or Steam store, and perhaps, stuck around.

66

It seems to me like piracy is a big issue. Maybe it’s not as big as the publishers make it out to be, but hand waving it away as a non-issue is irrational.

I also don’t think anyone who pirates would have necessarily have spent $60 (though I bet many would have - See Diablo 3), but after they pirate they spend exactly $0. Maybe they would have waited for a steam sale and spent $30 on a digital copy, or waited a year and picked it up for $15. IT doesn’t matter,t hat’s cash going into the marketplace, and thanks to digital releases, even $15 is a decent amount to get, specially a year after a release.

67

Are you not aware of Elite 4?

68

Instead, they have gamers go “Are you crazy?” and “I’m not buying that shit”.

Substitute Fallout for SimCity and Elder Scrolls for The Sims. I wanted Fallout 3, but what I got was a game that had Fallout themes and items, but not the same gameplay as any Fallout. Note to game publishers: fans of a particular game are going to buy sequels because they liked the original game, if they wanted a different kind of game they’d BUY a different kind of game. If you keep an old title but change just about everything else about a game, you’re gonna lose your customers.

69

On that note, things like side stories are almost a genre unto themselves - and there’s definitely room to alter a given game and take it in a new direciton if you want to do that. There’s nothing wrong, conceptually, with a Fallout game as a big open-world shooter. But it’s also important to remember that it isn’t Fallout. Bethesda didn’t understand that, so they made Elder Scrolls 3.5: Apocalypse Edition. Obsidian did, and they made New Vegas, which had its faults but sold very well and was an amazing game; it actually may have made more money. Given that Fallout 3 had enough marketing to choke a camel and New Vegas had virtually none, well…

But this just points to a basic issue. If you make the decision to market a game using older games, and specifically when you do so as a sequel, you are inviting comparisons. You are the one making explicit promises that this new game is in the same vein as the old one, and if you liked that, you should like this. And simply forgoing a digit (“5” in this case) and pretending it’s a “reboot” really doesn’t do much.

EA’s understands marketing. They’re really good at it, and in a better-run company they’d put that to use building strategic visions. The problem is that they only understand marketing. They seem to have an active, willful misunderstanding of the customer. I’d call it contempt, but I don’t think it’s malicious in that respect. EA, as an organization, simply doesn’t know what games are, because EA sees them only from the perspective of trade: give people games and get money in return. Because they don’t understand that the customer cares about the game, they consistently think that creating them is like any physical product: you put in the required development time and resources decided upon in advance, ship the product, and done.

Ironically, EA’s attempts to sell “software as a service” is something they don’t understand. Valve does, and has worked very hard to turn STEAM into a service. it’s not a very great service, but it does the job. EA still thinks in the pattern above, but wants all the benefits of running a service - like having ongoing income from customers. But they haven’t yet figured out that ongoing payments mean ongoing benefits to the customer base. They expect something in return.

In short, EA basically act not like steely-eyed financiers. They act like bumbling undergrad interns who don’t know what business they’re in, much less how it works.

70

Diablo is a much bigger franchise than Torchlight.

If I were an investor I would’ve looked at sales of Diablo II (17 million) versus the sales of Torchlight (1 million) and based my predictions of how well the sequels would sell based on that, rather than some forum hype.
I would have noted that Torchlight is often described as a “Diablo-clone”.

It’s absurd to claim the difference in sales between D3 and TL2 as proof that DRM has a significant, positive effect on sales.

71

Well, who do you think EA cares more about? It’s the investors that pay the bills.

72

You’re probably right.

I still contend that, had D3 released with an offline single player, it would NOT have sold anywhere near 12+ million copies. I’d wager 4 million, tops.

What Diablo 3 and likely SimCity (even after all the issues) will show investors and publishers is that you CAN sell just as many, or even more copies of a game on PC as you can on consoles… so long as you eliminate the piracy component.

It’s probably true that piracy is absolutely NOT the only factor involved, but that’s not what their going to see, or even understand. I doubt higher ups at EA have any notion of things like gameplay balance, control mechanics, or near anything gamers actually care about.

You’re right. To them games are like vats of olive oil that need to be traded.

But isn’t that always the case? With very few exceptions, these big corporations aren’t being lead by people grounded in the arts or entertainment. They aren’t game developers with a passion for creating amazing gaming experiences.

They are suits with a passion for money.

73

If you’re trying to show how developers and publishers should pay attention to long-time fans of a franchise, you should pick your examples more carefully. Fallout 3 arrived fully a decade after the last Fallout game. Not only was ten years long enough (at that time, in the video game industry) for tastes to change radically, but it was a multi-platform game aiming at a much wider audience. And it ended up selling (as I recall) an order of magnitude more copies than its predecessors.

Anyway, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. If companies are hurting their bottom lines by going online-only, they’ll figure it out eventually. Playing Armchair Business Strategist won’t do much good.

74

There are plenty of successful games that have no or minimal DRM (e.g. entering a serial code). I don’t see why the hypothetical investor would ignore one kind of data, and focus on another.

Yep, and their ignorance might just run an industry into the ground.
Just like with the music industry where sales had been in long-term decline but, nah, it must be piracy: we just need to police to the max and everything will be OK.

Actually, for PC games we’re already there. The AAA end of the market, which is heavily DRM, is seeing a trickle of games each year, many are afterthought ports of the Xbox version.
Meanwhile the indie end of things is growing rapidly despite being far more casual about DRM for the most part.
Clearly the former end of market is still bigger than the latter. But as an investor, you need to take account of which way the market is going.

75

Successful in what way? In a way necessary for a 50-75-100 million dollar investment? Or in a $500,000-$2M indie? What other PC exclusive in recent history, and without an always online component have sold anywhere near 12+ million copies in under a year?

Is Diablo 3 the ultimate PC game ever? I’d say DeusEx was probably just as anticipated, but that sold better on consoles - it certainly didn’t sell no 12+ million copies on PC. Skyrim? Bethesda games are super popular on PC thanks to the modding community - we don’t how much it sold on PC exactly, but estimates are in the 2-3 million range. Is Skyrim really 4 times less popular than Diablo 3?

I don’t necessarily disagree with you here. but it’s a two way street. This isn’t just the big evil corporations. They play a part - perhaps the main part, but piracy IS a problem.

76

Ultimately, no.. The investors pay upfront, but then you have to pay them back by getting money from gamers.

77

Looks like fun, but not much like Dungeon Keeper.

I did miss this one, but I can’t afford to back everything.

These are funded in pounds; do British and U.S. kickstarters show the same projects?

78

Which is almost certainly bullshit. It would mean that EA was footing the bill for the equivalent of a high-end PC in some server farm for every single person who bought SimCity. No one provides that level of cloud computing without charging a monthly fee.

No, the only reason the game has to be online is DRM and synching between adjacent cities. The simulation is being run locally.

79

Yep. I might buy a game because of its marketing, ONE time. If the game doesn’t live up to the marketing, or is drastically different from what I wanted from the franchise, then I’m very, very unlikely to buy any more games in that franchise. I was extremely disappointed in Final Fantasy IX, though it had some good concepts. Then I bought and tried to play FFX. Square/Enix lost me as a customer with FFX. I had been an extremely loyal customer up to FFX, I even bought the PS ports of the old NES/SNES games. Fool me once, shame on you, but I will possibly give you the benefit of the doubt. Fool me twice, and I’ll hold a grudge forever.

I’m going to take a second look at Fallout: New Vegas based on what others have said. I bought Fallout 3 because it was advertised as fALLOUT. If F:NV is great, then I’ll reconsider my opinion of Bethesda taking over the Fallout franchise.

People are still playing FO and FO2. FO3 was a successful game, sure, but it wasn’t a FO game. I mean, I bought FO3, and it’s possible that I’ll buy other FOs. But it’s no longer a guaranteed sale. Of the many people who bought FO3, I wonder how many regret their purchase. I know that I regret my purchase. So, it succeeded in new sales, but somehow I think that there are many people who, like me, are now very reluctant to buy any new FO games…or any games by Bethesda.

If I MUST be online to play a game, then I’m not going to buy that game. Period. As I said earlier, there are too many times when it’s impractical or impossible for me to go online. Companies who are try to pull this shit might get a load of suckers the first time a game comes out with these requirements, but the thing about suckers is that many suckers will learn from the experience.

80

It’s not a non-issue, but it’s a small issue, that’s turned into a big issue because it’s a convenient excuse–“Our game didn’t fail because of any of our faults in designing/marketing it, it failed because of piracy. So don’t fire us!”

Recent statistics I’ve seem indicate that, with music at least, people who pirate end up spending about 30% more money than people who don’t. I haven’t seen any overall reason to believe that it’s significantly different for games.

GOG seems to be doing quite OK selling older games without DRM. And you’re discounting all the people who do, in fact, buy games after they pirate them first. There are way too many games that are crap, but you don’t know it until you try it, and piracy does cull some of this. I recall hearing, for example, that the new Aliens game that everyone hates had their initial demos and trailers done by a completely different company than the actual game. Piracy probably has hurt that game in that pretty much anyone who played the game thinks it sucks.

So if your game sucks and depends primarily on people buying it before word gets around about how bad it is, piracy will probably hurt you. If your game is nothing more than a reskin/roster update of a previous version, then piracy may well hurt you (or at least you might want a way to turn off the old game).

Anything else, and piracy really probably isn’t all that huge of a deal if you look at it rationally.