SimCity Developers' Reddit AMA Swiftly Turns Into WTF With The Online-Only DRM?
techdirt.comReddit communities are a minefield, at least in terms of the larger subreddits; Reddit is a site which has a significant young, male, socially liberal audience that is suspicious of advertisers. On Reddit, companies are seen as inauthentic, because people pushing a product cannot contribute to a community that was created without a profit motive (i.e. Reddit). For many users, this suspicion extends to corporations as a whole, since the profit motive poisons any interaction a company has with consumers; any interaction is dismissed as inauthentic. This sense of cynicism has become pervasive throughout the site, such that any self-promotion is questioned, even when money is not at stake.
And EA thought it would be a good idea to advertise on Reddit? I can sympathize with the team members who have no control over the business decisions. I am sure they are great at making awesome games. However, a cursory search of Reddit would show that more vocal Redditors hold extremely hostile views of EA's games and business practices; these opinions cover such grounds as studio acquisitions, DRM, game quality, content distribution methods, DLC pricing schedules, and artistic vision--just to name a few topics of scorn. Given the extensiveness of the Reddit echo chamber, I wonder who at EA made the brave decision to send the SimCity 5 team into it.
Reddit also has a fairly dim view of IE, but that didn't stop the IE9 team from having a fairly successful AMA[1]. The difference was, the Redmond boys owned up to past failures and seemed genuinely interested in fixing them. EA's response to customer dissatisfaction appears to be to claim that they're wrong, and should not be dissatisfied. Two different approaches led to two entirely different outcomes.
An AMA on reddit can be successful for anyone, so long as they're primed on how best to interact with the reddit community. Obama was well-primed, and his inclusion of several reddit in-jokes in his replies (no doubt at the insistence of staffers) made for a very successful AMA, even if it was an easy crowd for him. On the other hand, Woody Harrelson should also have faced an easy crowd, but his ignorance of what's expected in an AMA led to that infamous clusterfuck.
EA should have known that online-only DRM would be a big issue, and they should have prepared a better answer to it. That they didn't is only their fault, especially given what I suspect is fairly high reddit usage among the rank and file there.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_memb...
Last year I had a few weeks between real internet connections at my house, and it really drove home how bad an idea these systems are. Even Steam, which ostensibly has an "Offline Mode" did not do as well as I'd have liked because one of the residents didn't have it set to log in automatically.
So now we're in a situation where all of her games refuse to open and we won't be back online for a while. But you'd think Steam would have no problem authenticating through a tethered EDGE connection. It's not a ton of data, and it doesn't need low latency. But it didn't work. Even if webpages loaded (albeit not quickly), Steam would not log in.
So it strikes me as incredibly arrogant for companies like EA and Ubi to come along and tell me that these always online systems aren't a problem. They are. And it sucks how many users accept them. Even when we're not talking about days/weeks like I discussed above, small Comcast outages here are not uncommon, and it's crazy that games will quit or entirely refuse to run when they happen.
I absolutely agree that they should have seen the reaction coming. The same kind of systems have been in place with games like StarCraft 2 and Assassins Creed, and they've all gotten similar receptions on sites like Reddit.
It's interesting that you had issues launching Steam games without an Internet connection. I've never had a problem with it, although I've got a MBP and so my library of games is quite limited. Might the issue have not been Steam, but rather something the game publishers had included that caused it not to work?
If you have Steam set to remember your password and log in automatically, it's fairly reliable. If you prefer to not leave passwords remembered, Steam will not launch even in Offline Mode until you restore the connection and authenticate. This is by design.
While I understand the reasons for designing it this way, it's still very annoying to be caught off guard by it. I'm glad that nobody could get access to any actual account data like my friends list, time played, etc. But I'd much rather it be a system like the Mac App Store, where software will run no matter what once it's been downloaded, and running things I've installed is entirely separate from my account authentication and anything with personal information in.
The TechDirt article says this:
> [Developer] Kip's followup was downright laughable. > > "We will allow you to play for as long as we can preserve your game state. This will most likely be minutes."
Everyone seems to hate on the DRM, thinking that it's just a business decision that is not at all integral to gameplay, but they all seem to be forgetting one key thing:
The new SimCity is, at its core, a multiplayer game!
Sure, it's a multiplayer game with the majority of the user experience dedicated to non-social, intra-city interactions. But your city lives within a global economy, and if it's possible to mutate your offline state without mutating your online state, then sync becomes a huge problem.
Consider the server that models a consistent virtual entrepreneur who's moving or visiting from one city to another (which the new AI actually might do, from seeing the videos). Now, say the destination city goes offline for hours. Both the source city and the destination city could end up believing that the virtual entrepreneur is helping their city grow. If the offline time period is short (i.e. the "minutes" that the developer refers to), then the offline city can "snap back" to the correct state much as laggy players see themselves jumping across a map in a shooter. But if it's a long offline period, they could be snapping back in a very visible and jarring way. And it's near impossible to test all of the edge cases unless you can make assumptions about maximum latency before a disconnect.
The developers can only be faulted for not communicating the intricacies of an MMO to their audience well enough. Instead, they allowed their game server to be characterized as a DRM device, and tried to respond to criticisms as if it was just a DRM device.
I want to be able to play Skyrim offline. But I have no qualms about WoW disconnecting me if I go offline for more than a few minutes, or if I tried to log on with a stolen or copied account. I'd expect them to do the same to other players who did so. On that note, we should really just be glad that they're not making SimCity a subscription service!
I think that a lot of people are aware of that; they question whether it actually adds value to the game. Given the choice between an entrepreneur that moves between cities (and other similar features) or a game that works when the internet goes down for 5 minutes, I'd take the latter.
Having interactions like pollution between neighbors is pretty cool. But there's no good reason it couldn't work with AI neighbors too. The online only features feel tacked on to force players into staying online all the time.
Perhaps a more important point that I should have mentioned: I can still play Sim City 2000 (published in 1994). Games like this that depend on online servers for basic functionality? I doubt they'll work in 18 years.
One thing about this DRM method that worries me is what happens in the future?
I still occasionally play my ooooold copy of simcity 2000. So if I do like the new simcity, what happens ten years down the line? Will I still be able to play it? Or will I not be able to authenticate/save/access old saves because the official simcity server was taken offline?
It seems to me that we are buying digital products with an expiration date. And that seems wrong to me.
That is broadly the reason why I don't have the Kindle, for example.
EA has in its bowels made a choice that Sim City fans will become its new cash cow. They will be now free to sell you the game and turn it off when they choose that releasing another version is more profitable. They easily could have allowed the game to function without inputs from neighboring areas or could have simulated it.
As a Sim City fan I am deeply disappointed since I have fond memories playing the game from the very first release. But these days I have chosen to only support and reward companies who do not make relationship with their customers a power play.
Capitalism is the answer to DRM.
If the games put out by bloated clueless bigcorps are filled with draconian DRM, then their lunch should be eaten by agile indie startups that know better.
If you buy video games, take note: Minimize or boycott entirely games that have DRM. Reallocate that part of your video game budget to buy DRM-free games. Use Gamersgate and Good Old Games; avoid Steam.
If you make video games, take note: There's at least some subset of people who hate DRM, and they'll presumably be attracted if you use the words "DRM-free" somewhere in your website/app description/marketing.
Online only DRM depresses me slightly, until the internet is available "everywhere" we shouldn't be restricted to having to be connected to it.
I play games on the tube, trains, on holiday without wifi and many other places where I don't have internet access.
Some of the most successful gaming devices of the past few years (iPhone/iPad), don't require an internet connection to work, neither do the major consoles. Why should be users be forced into this? Haven't they heard of laptops?