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http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/ea-and-the-red-cross-to-offer-aid-in-simcity

Ugh, they aren't even in the same ballpark. Microsoft use their cloud server infrastructure for all sorts of things.

THIS is the difference between a shitty cheapskate gaming company that mistreats their employees and a legitimate enterprise vendor.

EA provisioned literally *dozens* of servers for Simcity 5. MSFT is provisioning 300,000 servers out of countless servers operating the Azure network.

That's true, they should be much clearer about that.

But technically they're clear from any accusations of misinformation, because the system requirements (from here) say you need broadband internet to play. It's kind of a dick move to hide stuff like this in the small print and still leave it ambiguous what the internet is used for, but you can't say you didn't know you needed internet access to play.

Prove it.

Okay. http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-Benefits-of-Live-Service

GlassBox does more than just segregate computing tasks, it also allows us to make it so that you can create specialized cities that are visually unique and personalized, and that can be economically integrated into a larger region. Youâ(TM)re always connected to the neighbors in your region so while you play, data from your city interacts with our servers, and we run the simulation at a regional scale. For example, trades between cities, simulation effects that cause change across the region like pollution or crime, as well as depletion of resources, are all processed on the servers and then data is sent back to your city on your PC. Every city in the region is updated every three minutes, which keeps the overall region in sync and makes your decisions in your city relevant to any changes that have taken place in the region.

Yup, here's the developers own words in december: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-Benefits-of-Live-Service

"GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game -- the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer."

So they manage to come up with this new fantabulous engine to model every single person, except now they can only have 100k in each city because of it, all for something that most people who play simcity really dont give a crap about. Did anyone really follow any sims in simcity4? I doubt it, no one cares, because its not the sims, its about the city and not a single person.

Let alone that it 'attributes portions of computing to the EA servers', if thats true then why is it limited at all

One of the other reasons for the always-on requirement is probably the fact that some computations are offloaded to EA-servers.

GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game -- the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer.

source

But also forcing it for save-games is a bit silly.

According to EA, hte reason for the always online requirement, is because the game truly is a client server model. Each client, runs 1 region at a time. it then sends data about what has occurred in that region to then be processed by the EA server's and then pushed to the other regions in that game. This occurs every three minutes. Welcome to cloud computing.

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-Benefits-of-Live-Service

If the dev's team explanations are correct, and actual simulation logic if off-loaded, you'd have to replace logic which only exists on the servers.

"...GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer."

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-Benefits-of-Live-Service

Release a new game in stores, release an old game that anyone can play over the net.

Simcity did it not too long ago. You can play the origional SimCityonline.

I guess that this makes Houston the first official SimCity now othat they have chosen to use the SimDesk software? Soon we will see aliens invading, fires, floods, and earthquakes all happening in the city of Houston as stressed city workers press the 'Disaster' button over and over...