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SimCity 5: How Not To Design a Single Player Game
It seems that the requirement to be online and save games on a remote server even in single player mode is leading to a less than ideal launch for SimCity 5. choke writes "Players attempting to play EA/Maxis' new SimCity game are finding that their save games are tied to a particular server, are facing problems with disconnects, inability to track friends or search for specific coop games online and failures to load game, and wait times of 20 minutes per login attempt. The question is, why the online restriction? Does this possibly indicate future micro-transactions in game?"
Seems like every new EA release has similar issues. With hordes of bad amazon reviews because of it.
I miss the era simple gaming. Where myself and my buddies would have a LAN party. COD4 was a godsend when I was deployed.
From the Ars Technica story:
Hopefully EA will learn from the experience and buff up its servers ahead of the game's official European launch on Friday.
As nice as that would be, it's the wrong lesson. The lesson EA needs to learn here is the same one that every other video game publisher has to learn: don't build inherently single-player games with always-on requirements! There was no reason for this in SimCity.
Maybe the next SimCity will learn that lesson from this one. Maybe EA will release a patch that offers the option of offline play. We can hope ... but as it stands now, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the end of the SimCity series -- Maxis' version of Master of Orion III, if you will.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Didn't someone just claim that EA were not scumbags?
Because this is again stuff a scumbag does.
In another X years, you will not even be able to save progress with this game. Why would anyone buy into that?
What a ridiculous question... We know that there are at least 3 obvious reasons for this:
1) To prevent you selling the game. I'm guessing that there is some unique key for the copy you bought tied to your online profile.
2) To make you have to upgrade when they shut off the servers for SimCity 5 when they launch SimCity 6. EA are known for this. Anyone tried play FIFA 2011 or The Sims 2 online recently...?
3) To try and stop piracy. Instead of just having to activate online, which could be bypassed by some enterprising cracker, now bits of the game need a connection to actually function. Makes the job of cracking it more difficult I guess.
And yes, there will be micro-transactions. Be prepared for the worst.
"Looks like a hurricane is headed for your city. Pay $5.99 now to save your citizens!"
And if you believe that, I have some oceanfront property near Denver to sell you.
SimCity 3000 was released 13 years ago. Care to guess how much desktop computing power has advanced since then? Here's a hint: A lot.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
...to the consumer.
No one minds WoW (etc.) requiring an online connection because that connection serves a purpose and delivers part of your experience. Without it you lose the basis of the game. Even while farming you have some social interaction and the chance to go off and raid or help out a guildy.
But what does this bring? As I understand it there is a social component to the new simcity but is it fundamental to the game? No. Can you build a city on your own? Yep. And on top of all that you don't bother getting your auth server (and save server) working properly? What's *wrong* with the people running this show?
Microtransactions can require internet *for the transaction*. Multiplayer? Sure. But the nonsense around single player games needing to be online to check in? It just walks down the restrictive path that the music industry tried with MP3 and DRM. You won't win.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Commerce, wont you think of the children.
We'll be having micro transactions for everything!
*This post is deliberately meant to be stupid and lulzy.
My brother talked me in to pre-ordering the game, it's been awhile since I had played any of the sim city games and I enjoyed the 1hr beta using his account.
But wow what a clusterfuck yesterday's launch was. I was woken up around 2am by our infant and used that as an opportunity to d/l and install the game. Apparently it was a very wise decision. Once I got home from work around 5pm ET trying to get connect and stay connected was impossible. Three times I got a city started only to get booted after about 15 minutes and the game did not save any of my progress. After making and eating dinner my brother and I tried to start our own region. That took around 30 minutes before it finally worked and again we were kicked after about 20-25 minutes. I gave up at that point since the baby was fussy and my wife needed a break.
The N. American servers were filling up almost immediately after being brought online. It's almost as if EA thought only a third of their pre-orders would try playing on day 1. But a failed launch for EA is par for the course. Fool me once, shame on you... fool me again, shame on me.
The game itself was enjoyable during the beta... too bad the publisher is one of the worst companies on the planet.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
EA hasn't been a game maker for years. They're just another Hasbro now. Turning out cheap copycat toy after cheap copycat toy. The only difference is who's branding they put on the game. They want everyone to pay more and more regardless of how much they paid for the game up front and that is much more difficult offline. With an always on, always tied to your account, always able to verify, always able to control the save game so you can't possibly just hex edit yourself the extra ???? you need.
The reason EA games suck is not because they are more greedy than useful, the reason EA games suck is because they are hundreds of times more greedy than useful. Ubisoft is hardly any better, those they at least learned how retarded always on was and stopped.
Remember, always connected means you in no way own your game. When they turn off the servers, your game goes away and you don't get your money back, its just done. No one will play SimCity5 again after that point.
Won't effect me.
When I first heard about SC5 after seeing the fucktarded SimCities Socities, I thought KICK ASS! A new SimCity ... and then put it in the back of my mind until it was actually released so I don't nag myself about it until then ... then yesterday I read a review on arstechnica.com ... Always on, small play area, economy is entirely unpredictable and irrational in its turns from bust to boom to bust with no logical reason why, all sorts of further issues in the full article. All of the issues seemed to stem from the fact that force you to play and depend on other people.
NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO FUCKING PLAY GAMES WITH INTERNET MORONS OKAY?
I certainly don't. Sometimes, I do. Sometimes I will play with friends, in certain games, when my mood fits it. But any game that I'm going to sit down and dedicate hours of effort and planning to, I'm only going to play with about 3 select friends who will NEVER have the time to be online at the same time as me (kids tend to make schedules hard on you). The rest of the Internet is pretty fucking annoying to deal with in those games, I certainly don't want my game to have to deal with how that jack ass sells his commodities and prices which screw my plan or spews his environmental mess at me.
I ALREADY HAVE REAL LIFE, I DON'T WANT IT IN A GAME.
In a game I want to be in control. I don't want to be at some little 'Anonymous' asshole's whim.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
They may have good reasons to do it, but it's still a reason I won't buy it for various reasons, most importantly, will I still be able to play it in 20 years? I still pull out Civ 2 from time to time, as well as other games from the early-mid 1990s. I don't have any expectation of being able to do the same with titles like this.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Simcity 5 dumbed down the road and zoneing system way to much.
I want citys in cities in motion 2
Look, this is from someone who last night made his first city about 8 times and lost it all 8 times because of the server nonsense. I was pretty annoyed.
But if we're going to lambaste someone for doing the always-online thing, maybe we shouldn't just jump to conclusions, maybe you should, learn something about i it first? Or maybe you just want to be hip & cool like everyone else and be against always-online without using any actual critical thinking. If so, bravo.
One of the cornerstone features of the game this time around is the Region play aspect. This was introduced in Sim City 4, but they've taken it to a much more interesting place in this iteration. Basically, there are about a dozen regions you can choose to play on; first, you choose one. Each region has X 'city slots'. This doesn't necessarily mean # of players, but it obviously puts a cap on X players in that region. Nothing stops you from building all X cities yourself over time. The cities have a lot of interconnection, hooked up by highway, or rail, or whatever. You can specialize one city as a college town, make another the bedroom community, etc. And, of course, you can invite people into your game (if its private, otherwise they just find it) to fill out the other cities instead -- and cooperate, fight, whatever.
That doesn't work without a server authority, so that needs always-online to work. Otherwise you'd need one person to host, and never stop. So this is logical. Plus, you can still play it by yourself if you want.
The part you can argue for the always-online component is whether they should have let you play in a local region offline. That's a reasonable question. But they didn't just 'tack always-online' on as a form of DRM (though I'm sure they were happy to have it) -- its pretty clearly a foundation of the way they expect the majority of people to play. And I think they're right -- the *only* reason I'm playing the game is so I can play with my brother. If it was a purely single player game, I'd have passed.
Now if could just get that server mess sorted out, I think this would be a fun game. From what I've seen so far, the UI is easily the best SimCity has ever had. It was pure pleasure laying out zones & drawing roads, etc. And I like their module system for expanding the utilities & other buildings.
It's not fair to say this is "how not to design a single player game". That's insipid. They've taken a single player game and made an interesting multi-player game, that if you really want to you can play by yourself. That's not the same thing.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
They're just driving people to bittorrent, where people cracked the games and allow single-player offline play.
Are you really so stupid as to think EA has more processing power at its disposal than millions of potential customers?
You're really claiming that EA has more processing power sitting around idle just for SimCity 5 players than its entire customer base has combined sitting on desktops?
Really?
That stupid are you?
You must believe EA to have the single largest computing infrastructure in the world.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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
One of the other reasons for the always-on requirement is probably the fact that some computations are offloaded to EA-servers.
source
But also forcing it for save-games is a bit silly.
Sorry I got burned on Diablo 3. I love Sim City but I will never buy another single player game that requires an internet connection to their servers just for me to play. Because years down the road when they decide "Hey its not worth running this anymore" they will pull the plug and then you have a game that is no longer playable. Either that or the servers were always down when I went "Well its my day off lets go play for a bit".
The always on connection is nothing more than DRM in disguise. If the pirates hadn't been so keen to rip every game they could get their grubby little hands on this sort of nonsense probably wouldn't have happened.
Yes I know, the truth hurts. But if you're a company thats spent 10s if not 100s of millions on developing a game you're no longer going to watch that investment go down the toilet via a DVD bit copier. They figure that since most gamers now have always on broadband the inconvenience is minimal. Except when they fuck up like this of course.
Piracy isn't the issue here, EA is making it this way so when they shut down the servers in 3-ish years you can't play the game and they can move you onto SimCity6. They already killed the "used game market" for PC games and now they are moving to the "software as a service" model so they can remove games you bought to entice you with a new one. I for one won't be renting games from them, I'll go back to playing SimCity 2000 or SimCity 4 instead.
EA said you are now entitled to a refund! Rip them off!
This is considered news? Anyone who paid to rent this part of EA's temporary entertainment service must have known it was going to be a train wreck for a week or so, then be littered with similar problems from time to time, until the service is withdrawn.
Not-knowing-what-regressions-are-FAIL:
Origin didn't allow purchasers to pre-load SimCity before its official launch at 12:01am EST this morning, apparently because the development team was "working to polish the game until the very last second"
Hint: you don't "work to polish the game until the last second", you work to polish and then delay launch because you can't be sure of the quality until you've retested and had a solid set of builds passing your regression testing and product testing. Who can possibly think it is a good idea to still be changing software code seconds before the launch?
Server-capacity-FAIL:
Later, even after the problems were officially "resolved," EA warned that "due to server load it may take up to three hours for your game to unlock.
Invasive-DRM-where-you-make-legitimate-users-suffer-disproportionally-for-your-FAILures:
Some online reports indicate that even those with the disc-based retail version of the game were delayed in their installation by Origin server problems.
Got-it-wrong-before-and-still-managed-to-FAIL:
The issues bring to mind the infamous "Error 37" that prevented many Diablo III players from logging into the game in the days after its launch last year, though it's unclear how comparatively widespread SimCity's server issues are
It isn't surprising that EA treats their customers like shit, but it is still infuriating that they can get away with this.
The "We must use the cloud to provide you with all the mathification going on!" claim is also weakened by the oppressively narrow limits on city size.
> your PC is not doing the backend work for the city simulation - its cloud based now.
Which is a crock of shit.
They found that in reality your computer was sending around 40MB/hr and receiving about 3MB/hr back. That 3MB can't be much more then basic calculations, which if it can drive the graphics it could easily do some extra back-end calculations.
Not *that* much math!
X Years? try now. Players are complaining that saved games won't load back.
The game has been deliberately broken in the name of DRM, without any thought of what the outcome would be. With no commitment from EA to remove this built-in self-destruct, anyone would be a fool to buy this game. In 18 months when the "water pumps that work" DLC and the "slightly larger map, so you can actually build a city" DLC fails to meet sales targets, EA will simply pull the plug and all those people who paid a premium price will find, what they had was a bug-ridden FaceBook game.
Blaming "high demand" for these problems is an outright lie. The servers were taking three hours for people to download and unlock the game and 30 minutes to connect! This was when only pre-order clients and press who'd stayed up until midnight were on-line - hardly the maximum player-base you'd expect, certainly nowhere near "high demand".
And why would they be needed anyway for a SINGLE PLAYER game? Because EA broke it.
That was their initial claim, but they stopped really pushing that angle once the drm backlash started. Though even a developer statement back in december briefly mentioned it again. From early reviews, since the cities are so small, and the sim resident count 1/100th of what it used to be in titles meant to run on hardware with 1/10th the speed, that whole online processing seems like complete BS. Otherwise why restrict the city size so much, why not let us build an NYC with millions of inhabitants instead of limiting us to a large suburb with at most 100k residents
No, GP has it right, didn't you know that for every copy of SimCity 5 that is sold, EA provision and install an additional server into their cloud.
Exactly... that was the same thing Blizzard said about Diablo 3, it needs to be always on for some server work when released on the PC; then came out on the Xbox and it's got an offline mode. Only thing they needed it for on the PC was for DRM and the auction house.
Again, this pointless "every game pirated is a lost sale" arguments. I'd say that most kids who pirate the game would never have had the money to buy the game in the first place.
I'd bet that companies lose more money into trying to make their games secure than the total of potential lost sales.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
There is a better game idea on kick starter
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1584821767/civitas-plan-develop-and-manage-the-city-of-your-d
EA has gone to far this this I was thinking about getting simcity 5 but the beta was a real trun off for me. I want to get this and cites in motion 2
Do you honestly think they programmed it to calculate efficiently? They had deadlines to meet and game play issues to work out.
Why are people still buying EA titles? They go as far as possible out of their way to prevent paying customers from using their products as possible. Stop giving them money and they will stop screwing you over.
I wasn't aware EA had grabbed up Maxis.
I played the shit out of Sim City and Widget Workshop growing up.
I had heard another sim city was being released and I was kind of excited, but ugh, not anymore.
Fuck you EA.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Pirates may have hastened the process, but even without them this would come eventually as a way for publishers to battle their other nemesis: Second-hand games. An effective DRM system can also be used to stop people from selling the games on cheap when they are done, which in turn means everyone pays retail rather than sensibly waiting a few months so they can buy that $60 for $10 in the used bin.
EA treats you gamers like shit all the time and you keep coming back game after game like an addict needing a fix. All this crying and bitching and I guarantee every single complainer here will be first in line for the next EA launch.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
There is no way I can believe that there is a single player game out there that requires more processing power than a single PC can deliver. That seems rather... expensive.
Could you imagine the programmer who approached his boss with THAT one?
Programmer: Yeah boss, turns out that we made the computational requirements of this engine so complex that it requires us to maintain extra servers to handle the calculations for each gamer. So, that's cool right?
Boss: So help me god, if you actually think my answer would be yes I may have to throw you out of the window.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
of game developers have no idea what they are doing?
Mostly becasue they lack any real experience or engineering skills.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The limit of what you can do easily is not give them money. There are plenty more things you could be doing, depending on how much you really care:
1. Encourage others to not give them money.
2. Start a campaign to spread awareness about how their (and any other similar) games harm everyone.
3. Start a campaign to boycott any games similar to this. A nice fancy website listing these games would be a start.
4. Bring this up as a consumer rights issue, start a lobby.
If you get enough people wound up about something, you can get the backing and momentum to really have an effect. Unfortunately few people actually care enough to do more than complain on slashdot as they're downloading the thing they claim to hate so much. There is much that could be done, but few people willing to do it.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The N. American servers were filling up almost immediately after being brought online
The issues with always-on DRM have been known for awhile. However, if so many people bought the game for launch, then I doubt EA's going to be getting the message that it's bad for sales...
Absolutely false. in fact the reason Maxis gave for why they can't increase city size is that people's computers aren't powerful enough to handle it on the low end. If cloud magic was doing all the math, why would that be a problem?
The actual simulation is running on your system, using your CPU. The severs are there to enforce some rules and make multiplayer work... and to act as DRM.
Oh, and totally break the game for no good reason right now. How is the game getting an undeserved bad rep when people have had their cities corrupted by the servers and become unplayable multiple times? "Load save games" is not some nifty addon. If your program can't do that, it's fucking broken.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I played all last night and I had no issues.. made about 5 cities. So I don't know what this article is talking about. They were also still there this morning.
No, GP has it right, didn't you know that for every copy of SimCity 5 that is sold, EA provision and install an additional server into their cloud.
Is that where all those old Atom netbooks are going?
More Twoson than Cupertino
If I can run truly massive SimCity 4 custom maps on a 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM with no problem, then I would hope SimCity 5's normal maps would run fine on the average i3 or i5 CPU out there. Even though the graphics may be much improved between 4 and 5, I can't imagine the back-end simulation would be so much more complex that my i5 can't handle it.
And for anyone that says you can't assume everyone will have at least an i3, they've been out for more than 3 years now so I think it's safe to assume that a majority of people will have an i3 or better now or will in the near future.
So... breaking the game for the people that actually gave you money for it fixes piracy... how?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Note: I don't own the game, and likely won't.
That said, EA was pretty clear in that Sim City 5 is a multiplayer game that has the option of a private game with only 1 person, not a single player game with a multiplayer option.
Calling Sim City 5 single-player is like calling Tribes (letting my age slip) a single-player game because you could setup a private map with bots.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Won't pirates simply remove the online check and play offline though? Perhaps you can point me at a single example, since the start of video gaming, where a game couldn't be modified in this way. Come to that, can you point me at a single example of any game, ever, which has had it's copying prevented via any copy protection system?
Every dumb ass that bought that EA shit stain deserved every second of their queue times. Lets see: Gutted map sizes with Regions 1/4 the size of Sim City 4 (+1 step backwards) plus actual cities smaller then Sim City 1 (+4 steps backwards) along with gutted gameplay (no underground utility design, no subways... +3 steps backwards) along with always online requirement and DRM (+10 steps backwards), pre-order nonsense (imagine paying up front at a restaurant for you food.... +2 steps backwards) in exchange for Curved Roads (-1 step backwards... wait, nm Sim City 4 had mods that added those +0 then) and no modding support (+10 steps backwards).
It's almost like EA was jealous that Monte Cristo made a shittier Sim City game then Societies (Cities XL) and wanted to 1-up Monte Cristo in the fucking horrible Sim Socialist genre so they made this "Sim City" which is more a Cities XL 2 then anything else. It's just missing that magical "No, the state has decreed that only Executives can purchase these homes. Be gone peasant and free market subscriber!"
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
So the people who have had their cities locked and unable to load now are complaining without reason?
Welcome to the world of a fanboy - where "save games can't be loaded" is apparently just whining.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
If you would rather steal games than pay for them then they don't have much of a choice, if you don't like it then don't buy the fucking game! It is pretty simple
Which I imagine is exactly what most of the pirates will do. Has the PC game industry done better for itself since the advent of always-online DRM? If not, then it's obvious to see that it is not effective. CD Projekt Red (makers of The Witcher and The Witcher 2) seems to be doing great with sales of their games, despite the lack of DRM.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Piracy has never been shown to do as much damage as publishers claimed. Somehow I doubt that if each incident of piracy was a lost sale and that piracy was double digit percentage points of the userbase that we'd see recession proof growth in the video game industry. There are a multitude of reasons why each incident of piracy is not a lost sale and why pirates eventually become paying customers as well as whhy EA's DRM stances could be doing more harm to them than the piracy they're deterring. That's why people don't like EA. They're not scumbags, but they are complete morons who don't understand why what they're doing is completely absurd.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
Second hand games isn't that much of a problem on the PC.
From my experience this isn't just a DRM screw up, but it did help to make it far worse. I'm crazy and refuse to play on Windows so I got it to work though Wine last night. I couldn't get into the NA servers so I opted to log into the other available server. I must have got things working at just the wrong time because every game that had been made was suspiciously all at 15 min. or more. It then refused to allow me to create and claim some land. I'd log out then back in after 30 min and still no new games had been made. This morning I was able to get into the NA servers and start up a game. However, the interface was different. Rather than an interface that allowed me to choose the tutorial or not it was a forced tutorial before you'd be allowed to go and do your own thing. At this point I suspect that some servers were running the wrong version of their software, and that is the source of the save game corruption. I don't really understand why the Tutorial wasn't an Offline option. Starcraft 2 got that part right by making it after I log in once I can play the campaign offline. Some single player offline content would have saved them some stress on their servers. They could also monopolize on the Pre Order scene a bit. If they insist on an Always Online model with the servers holding the load then they're going to need to do a tiered release over a week. Otherwise you're going to have everyone logging in on the same day. One one builds a system to have 100% of their users logged in EVER. It's like the phone company. If everyone picks up their phones at the same time 80% would get a busy tone or no dial tone. Having a single launch day ensures that everyone is going to login during the same window of time. This always online model needs a lot more work, or it needs to be scrapped.
The tiny city sizes chased me away from this one, but the online only requirement didn't help. Everybody but EA (and "professional" reviewers) knew the servers would collapse at launch just like they did with Diablo 3, and once again here we are.
That's okay, lots of other companies are happy to take my gaming dollars. Hopefully more people get the memo and stop buying. When a few games fail totally because of this always online nonsense, the publishers will get the message. In the end it's really only dollars that they understand.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
There is no "truth" in your post. There is clearly your opinion but it is a poorly informed one at best.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I'm content with SimCity 2000 and 3000, and 3000 has a native Linux version. It's the same stuff anyway, build and manage a city, I don't care about graphics. Best part, no always online garbage or games saved in the 'cloud'.
If you don't really care about graphics, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of awesome old games out there begging you to play them. And none of them treat you as a slave. Don't be a slave to these pricks, they don't care about you anyway; how much more do they need to do to you to prove this?.
It is further weakened by the existence of dwarf fortress, a game with larger maps with greater depth, a cellular automaton fluid dynamics engine, and the simulation of creatures down to the layers of their tissues, personality traits and their recent thoughts and memories.
The complexity of dwarf fortress is close to that. It can bring even an overclocked 4.5Ghz i7 to its knees on older fortresses, but that problem is solved just by slowing the simulation.
Ridiculous. Pirates always find away around DRM. Always. It's naive to think otherwise. Creating a simple DRM system that ensures that 95% will buy the game and will not be impeding is fine. These 'always on' systems are seriously impeding, however, and I won't be purchasing games that use them.
Looks like another classic game is going to suffer the effects of Greed, and be made into a money-grubbing, online-only, don't-even-think-about-playing-it-offline-by-yourself game.
Surely, I am not the only one out here to want games that I can play when there is no access to WiFi or any form of internet. Decent, engaging, immersive, single-player game play that does not require an account online somewhere, or constant call-home-to-mommy-for-permission-to-play crap.
Maybe I just want to play something to keep myself entertained while in the "boonies" or out of touch with the world?
Perhaps I don't want anyone else constantly monitoring my feeble progress through their killer levels with my n00b skillz while others snicker at my attempts, or spawn-camp me to rage-quitting something I've spent en exorbitant amount of money on in the first place.
Sorry for the rant. I just can't seem to part with my hard-earned cash so that I can be someone else s' target-practice.
Am I truly that alone out here?
Clearly, they ARE doing some calculations offline. Probably to figure out if you're cheating. They're not doing math for you, they're checking your math.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's a series of rather ignorant statements, considering all of the (often DRM-free) success stories on the PC.
A more accurate statement would be that lazy components within the videogame industry have been blaming piracy for the lacking success of their bad games for years.
Forgive me, I'm not seeing in the article where people are having "saved games can't be loaded" problems. If people are unable to load saves, that's a legitimate qualm with the game. It should go without saying. But all I'm seeing from the article is that some people had problems downloading the game at the moment it launched, which has been a problem with most games distributed online, yet I don't recall L4D2's shoddy launch being frontpage material.
Does this possibly indicate future microtransactions in game?
Yes.
I haven't seen this mentioned yet in the discussion above (maybe I missed it somewhere), but EA's CFO announced that all of its games would include microtransactions from now on.
Requiring an online tether would be a logical way to add or take away features in the future through microtransactions. Requiring your save file to be in the cloud would also prevent people from hacking around it. The launch problems won't stop this – EA will chalk it up to a server glitch, fix it and move on – because they see too much money sitting on the table. They watched the rise of Zynga, who made money on the most senseless games through addictive microtransactions, and said "we want a piece of that pie."
They simply failed to notice when my response to their CFO's announcement was: "20-year customer of EA to stop buying all future games." Not that I expected them to notice. It would take a lot more people than we have on Slashdot to wake them up, because for every person here who understands that microtransactions are a method for making you pay repeatedly for something you already bought, there are 10,000 average Joes out there who think microtransactions make the game better.
Where did they ever give that answer? All the beta testers have reported that if you pull your your internet cable, the simulation will continue to run fo at least a couple of minutes on the local machine. So I don't think the servers are running any simulation other then the global "Take import/export from all cityes, and calculate a global marked price for resources" part.
I'm with you; I love that, some 10 years on, I can still just fire up SC4 from time to time and play around for a little while. Then, if I'm changing PCs, all I have to do is copy a directory full of files to the new box. Sad that this is now a "killer feature", being able to control your data.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
Everyone remembers what Maxis stated about that. It's just that we're not stupid to buy that absolutely bullshit line. Do you seriously believe that, rather than letting my i7-3700K CPU right here in front of me do all the crunching, they have some massive series of super-computers somewhere that are doing the massive cumulative processing for everyone? And just how much bandwidth do you figure that is consuming? It'd be an enormous constant stream.
The ONLY thing being offloaded to the cloud is the negotiations of state between the cities in your region, operated by different players. The only reason THAT whole portion exists is to poorly justify the online component, which needs to exist to facilitate the shitty DRM.
And, frankly, all of this would be acceptable to a lot of people if the game itself wasn't so poor. No procedurally generated lands. Very small cities (too small to be able to build a self-contained city -- you run out of space quickly and have to rely on other people's cities for services that you dont physically have room for on the playfield to build).
I've played it for a few hours, now. I don't think I'll go back and I am truly regretting my purchase. I haven't felt ripped off like this for a long time. I haven't followed this as intently as I follow some other games through to launch, but there wasn't much coverage about the negatives of this game, leading up to it. All the "journalists" I read and watched covering it presented it as this massive, enormous, beautiful (meh, it isn't that impressive even on three 4gb 670s) cities with unlimited possibilities. Not once did I see them say "it's just too bad the transportation sucks and the cities are tiny as fuck".
Anyway, in the short time I've played, I've already had to upgrade almost every street I have into the biggest street possible. Even nice residential areas have six lane roads with trolly car tracks surrounding them. And even at that, there are major traffic congestion problems. No matter what your population is, it seems the bigger you make your roads, the more traffic they'll see. You'll never reach a sort of sane equilibrium.
Hey, I *wish* my city would be corrupted!
Once I felt I finally had the hang of things after a few hours, I wanted to wipe my city and start over. I can find no way of doing this. I don't really think there is one. It doesn't matter, though, because in the meantime I've grown bored of it and chalked this down as an expensive disappointment.
It's so sad what EA has done to the series. No "true" SimCity since SC4, each iteration seems to pander to the lowest common denominator rather than the true enthusiasts, which is understandable since they're in business to make money, not satisfy an enthusiastic fanbase. It's just sad that it's ended up this way. They could've built of SC4, added curved roads and much better pathfinding, and the majority of us enthusiasts would've been very happy, I'm sure. Oh well, haven't bought SimCity since SC4, and it looks like that shall continue. Won't even go into the pitfalls and idiocies that I read about in a few reviews (small map size, bugs, etc.).
For what it's worth i'm enjoying the game, it's alot of fun and I've only had 1 disconnect in over 8 hours of playing. I agree that they certainly could have made a single player mode with no achievements or other players in the region - I'm running all the cities in my region except for one guy who wandered in, but I do think the mutli region interaction is way better than what it was in Sim City 4. I got it at a discount for about $40 from a amazon promo and I think it's well worth it at that price ; maybe not the full $60.
Well I had already skipped over buying this over the DRM, Origin, DLC crap and the price but reading this really opens some eyes in that they really seemed to have built SimFarmVille http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this/
I believe it's much more than 'checks' some of the core functionality of the game is run on their servers.
I'm guessing that's why the city sizes are so small, it's based upon the amount of CPU/RAM they are willing to dedicate on their servers per-user, which is far less than your own sweet gaming rig can provide.
Or it's limited to what an XBox 360/PS3 can handle if there is/will be a port.
The person who gets a job and raises a family will tend to find their leisure time is at a premium. If they can game at all, it will tend to be on a very tight schedule. Now such people are far less likely to 'pirate' their games, given they have income AND lack the time to mess around with such solutions. No, they will pay for a service and EXPECT that service will operate as needed.
What happens. Our honest family man finds he has a free 50 minutes, and readies to play SimCity5, having switched on the computer 2 hours earlier to deal with the dozens of automatic updates just about every piece of installed software demands these days. He clicks 'start' and EA impolitely informs him "tough, our servers are down or busy or something". Disbelieving his eyes, he spends the next 20 mins tracking down the game forum, and then reads to his horror as EA official trolls scream abuse at complainants, informing them that EA's TOS allows EA to do anything it damn well likes, and only 'dirty pirates' think this is a bad thing. Threads are locked, threads are closed, and users are banned with the threat that the ban may well include the ability to use the single player version of the game itself.
Let me re-iterate the last point. Multiple game publishers have BANNED users from their purchased single-player games because of comments posted to official game forums. The same publishers PAY game review sites to applaud the TOS that illegally claim the ability to ban you from playing your paid-for single-player game. The publishers have actually turned the paying punters into the enemy, if such punters only seek to purchase the game outright.
Some of you 'out-of-touch' ex-gamers will think this insane and untrue, but you are wrong. Publishers are seeking to create the conditions where, after buying the game, you must continue to pay to use it. Yes, these morons want their games to be purchase AND a service- like THAT business model ever works. The truth is that games companies currently have the worst management and owners from an business education POV. Whatever cretinous immoral idea pops into the heads of these idiots, they try to implement.
It gets worse. As you might expect, the so-called services that flow from the game being partially 'online' are almost always hopeless and very half-baked. The game itself may be great- there are established teams that craft great product- but the services side is created by the worst teams of unenthusiastic wage slaves. What artistry is there in code merely designed to rip off the user.
It gets worse. The best games have excellent communities that support them, but these communities are 'free' and a consequence of hundreds of people showing their love for a game in terms of mods and other crafted elements (like Wikis and the like). No company has EVER come close to offering support even one hundredth as good as that provided by gamers for games like 'Doom', 'Quake', 'Fallout 3' or 'Skyrim'.
Bottom line. It should be ILLEGAL by consumer law for any single-player game installed on a user's computer to require online connection to play. New companies and industries never follow appropriate moral codes uncoerced. The consumer has RIGHTS and companies like EA should be thrashed for seeking to undermine these rights. Sadly, in a land where idiots still buy DVDs that force them to watch unskippable ads, new consumer rights are a dead letter. Your politicians (especially Obama) are bought and paid for.
Really? That's the only complaint? You haven't seen all the complaints of how idiotic and unappealing the region stuff is? How prone it is to abuse by griefers? How constraining the tiny city spaces feel? How rudimentary the transportation feels?
I like SimCity, because I get to be the mayor of an ever-growing city; not because I want to play a Facebook game with a tiny playing field or being forced to play eight or sixteen other cities all on my own, to make sure all the services and facilities I used to be able to handle in one city can no longer be done that way, because of a shitty need to justify poor DRM and online services.
why is this modded as funny?
You haven't seen all the complaints of how idiotic and unappealing the region stuff is?
No. I've been too busy enjoying the game, region stuff and all.
last time I checked Simcity4 was available through steam. or are you one of those people who don't like steam or want the game to be free (as in no charge)
Look at the list of games supported. It's pathetically small.
Xbox games can't have dedicated servers so you're screwed if they decide to shut down games like they did with Halo 2 and they are doing the same for Halo 2 PC. Halo 1 still online though.
Really, the permanent fix for DRM is a law that forces companies to publish the source code. IMO, piracy is not the main reason source code is closed. That's just a convenient excuse. Just about every software has been pirated and very few people bother to look at code.
They claim to use an agent-based approach simulating each object in the game. They also claim that this is what breaks the bank.
I'm sorry, butif that were that computationally intensive then offloading it on servers would cause them to asplode. In a modern PC the CPU will idle most of the time. That would have finally been something to max my CPU out.
Seems like the wrong engineering approach to the wrong problem.
Also oversubscribing your service on launch day has been a problem for every game release since forever.
How can a company as big as EA get it this wrong? I mean this can't be malice since they are also harming themselves. And it's too obvious. If even gaming hacks call these problems way in advance then there is very little surprise involved.
20 minutes into the future
at the time Doom was basically fully immersive virtual reality to us. Given that the Cyberdemon barely ever even had a pain animation, a lot of my friends were sure you had to lure it somewhere and squish it, or something like that.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
buys the rights to all your old favorite games implements them poorly, making them virtually unplayable.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Simcity 4 needs some bug fixes and other work that needs the source code to fix.
Cities in Motion is sweet. I wish you could take that and blend it with SimCity 4000.
I am an AVID SimCity fan. As much time most people have sinked into diablo2, I have dropped at least that much into the previous simcities. Bought all the expansions, first day. Loved them all to death. I know I'm not alone in this.
I will not be buying this game. In part because of the "always on" nature of the game, in part because it's EA. What's amazing to me is how these companies can take such brand loyalty and absolutely destroy it. And not just by releasing a bad game. Hell, how many of us are fans of franchises that have stinkers? No, they destroy it by abusing customers, by kicking them where it hurts, then trying to charge you more for the privilege.
So no thanks. As much as it will pain me not to play this latest installment and get my city on, I'm sitting this one out, thanks.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Meanwhile, anybody with a high end computer sees most of it's CPU time sitting idle while playing.
Funny how that works.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I've logged 10 hours in the game already without issue.
Obviously, if it worked for you it had to work for everyone else.
Right?
Cities in Motion 2 looks good!
I like that it has a good road system and I hope it get's some like the NAM mod for Simcity 4
Yep, many people have had save games get corrupted due to the server instability. I know one person who lost three cities that way. They're still there, but can't be loaded.
It's a total mess.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Raspberry Pi for premium customers, Arduino for the others.
Four years ago I got a copy of the original Bioshock for my PC. I had just moved into a new place and didn't have internet yet, so I decided to install this single-player game for entertainment until I had connectivity. Lo and behold I couldn't install the game, as it required a phone-home. I haven't purchased a computer game since. I've discovered hobby board gaming, which works great in the absence of power and internet connections. The new way of doing things in the world of video games can go eat it's own asshole.
Parts of the game engine is on the server. Without the server part nothing would work. That is until someone writes a server emulator.
will I still be able to play it in 20 years? I still pull out Civ 2 from time to time, as well as other games from the early-mid 1990s
Damn it now I just feel old.
Time to offend someone
High highs and low lows. My all time favorite FPS game BF2142 started out so buggy you could only play 1-2 rounds before a crash, then EA abandoned support for it, then rubbed it in releases new maps a year or two after game was all but defunct. They turned BF3 into CoD with vehicles, and now I'm expected to leave their damned server running on my machine 24-7 just to play (yeah you CAN turn it off by see how long you can keep that routine up).
They're capable of creating great content, but they act like they don't give a shit after they've got your $50. I don't even play BF3 any more the cheating is so flagrant and I'm tired of the waiting for the anti-hack patch to come out (probably conveniently around the time they release a new expansion set from what I've seen).
That's the problem with bean-counter driven development. You might milk your customers in the short run, but you lose them in the long run.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
If you want an example... Diablo 3 is exactly the same way. There has yet to be a working emulator that has working quests and mobs for Diablo 3 released to the public.
There are a couple private servers out there but... if you'd still need an internet connection to connect to the private server then you might as well play on the official blizzard server.
At least allowing subways would have been nice.
No, because the game engine is split between EA's servers and the local client.
Unless they also pirate EA's server-side simulation code and run their own servers, they aren't going to be playing offline.
Sim City Classic (Micropolis) works fine on my Linux system and Sim City 2000 works on my XP system.
Have they really added any got to have features to their many updates of the game, or are they just trying to capitalize on a well-known title to rake in more cash?
Nope. I assumed the reader would be smart enough to figure that out.
I've logged 10 hours in the game already without issue. I guess with all the hate people had for the game before anyone had even played it, it's not surprising people are trying to drum up controversy that's more than the obvious "I don't like that the game is always online."
Yeah, damn the retards for not being able to play the game they paid for over a decision that was controversial in the first place. You are able to play just fine apparently, so there's no problem.
Mod parent up. It's some spot-on truth from Gaiman: "You're not losing books, you're not losing sales, by having that stuff up there ..."
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Not just extra servers, but they'd need servers more powerful than a desktop computer for EVERY player connected. It's like buying a server with every copy of the game!
EA embraced Agile Development a while back. Coincidence? Look at all these big companies that have gotten suckered into drinking the Agile koolaid. Bugs, bugs, and more bugs. Angry customers galore. Negative reviews. Nobody wants to look deeper within organizations to find out what's going on. Some of you may want to blame management. Well, management embraced Agile. Maybe it's time we took a critical eye towards Agile.
Loosing (karma) is Fun.
All the same, it's getting so out of hand that instead of just boycotting games that have horrible DRM, I'm thinking of actually buying games that don't. Even if I don't really want to play them. Vote with my wallet and all that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
and its creator also cured all forms of cancer, went to Mars and back on a rocket he built from only what was in his basement, and beat Kim Jong-il in golf.
Only because of the Unicorns on the 11th green that ate Kim's ball.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Blatant lies are blatant. There is no Xbox version of Diablo 3, or any other game in the Diablo series.
They DID just announce an upcoming version for PS4/PS3, but they haven't said much about it yet; more details will come from PAX East later this month. I wouldn't doubt that it'll have an offline mode, but that wouldn't make your statement any less a lie.
Yes, we all know that any "server work" excuse for games like Diablo 3 are utter bullshit, but blatant lies like this don't help your argument.
My sig can beat up your sig.
Diablo 3 seems to do rather well.
I don't get why you're all upset. Heck, I'm the person who cracked most of the SimCity codes (double hex encoding) back in the day, and contributed all the original design ideas for wind, hydro, ferries, and various other things that popped up later in the game.
They told you, EA did, that they were going to included microtransactions in all their game platforms.
They are doing what they said.
The only good thing is they haven't done it to Sims3. There you can save locally, and upload if you want, but the customer base for that game is perfectly willing to buy "golden" items or things that use SimCash to buy on the Exchange.
It's because SimCity players aren't used to "buying" fancy toys for their cities that you're upset. If I was EA, I would have made certain building types purchaseable for SimCash, and let you buy "monster scenarios", kind of how Sims3 they have you buy "towns" which include extra content like hot air balloons and clothing patterns and kid toys.
Look, do you want to pay $100 a game? Or would you rather pay half that and then pay $10 or $20 extra for "premium" content?
This is why when I ran games, I gave away the game rules and charged for the service of processing them (also shows up in a different area of tax returns, for accounting purposes). Game cost the same in the end.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What server you on?
I finally was able to play when i logged onto the Europe EU server, however for the first 25 minutes of the gme itw as stuck in the tutorial and I couldn't leave.
Got booted and got server buy so couldn't get back in. Finally got back in againa nd played 10 mionutes before the server killed my connection. so that was a frustratiing waste of 60%
Boss: So help me god, if you actually think my answer would be yes I may have to throw you out of the window.
Programmer: With or without the chair?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
It's been a story here on slashdot, oh n00b. McQuown vs Electronic Arts.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
USWest 1. I did have a bug where I was forced to enter the tutorial on my second time logging in, after having already completed it the first time I logged in, but once it starts you can back out of it to effectively skip it. I'm going to be annoyed if I have to do that again.
There may be other stated ancillary reasons: social gaming, cloud enabled, anti cheating, but the main advantage always online has is Digital Restriction Management. The big dev houses and publishers are all over this. Given the current state of gaming, there isn't anything we (the collective we) can do about it. The EA's of the world have all of us by the short hairs and they know it. There is no viable market reason they will change anytime in the future.
Reason? There are way too many gamers that will still buy the product. These gamers range from too young to care to gamers who buy the game while grumbling about always on restriction and gamers for everything inbetween. The only way to change this developing trend, is to hit them where it hurts. Don't buy their game at all. You could take the time to write them a dead letter about why you refuse to buy their product, but they will relegate those letters to the looney trash bin.
So enjoy the always on DRM. Maybe technology will catch up and nearly everybody will have gaming friendly Internet connections in the future. This is unlikely in the next couple decades. So there may be a chance where the new generation of gamers will discover why DRM is a bad thing for single player games. Thus adding to the percentage of those that refuse to buy the game. But even then, a new set of gamers that are completely unconcerned will come into the market. It's a losing battle.
I wish the prospects were better, but with the instant gratification gamers types are in general - the Publishers will keep a firm grip on the bit and we'll go where they tell us. And we'll like it dammit!
I really liked the old Sim City games and would really like to try this one but I won't.
Sorry it was PS3 and yes, they stated very clearly it will NOT require an always on internet connection like the PC does.
Or maybe I just got the console wrong?
In any case yes, it's been widely reported that it will NOT have a real money auction house and will NOT require an always on internet connection like the PC which is a crock of shit given that they said it needed it since the servers would handle some portion of the game; but of course being on the PS3 most mid range PCs now are way past them.
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/02/25/diablo-3-on-ps3-and-ps4-will-allow-offline-play/
"You can have four people on the same screen - no split-screen, we just zoom the camera out. Or if you're offline,"
re: Is Linux support a possibility?
"Yes it is, we originally wanted to list it as a launch platform, but we decided to wait to add it to make sure that we would really be able to support it at the same time as the other platforms, due to time constraints. We didnt want to promise it, and then not deliver. Us linux users get enough of that as it is. If it is not available on linux on release day, it will be very shortly after."
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
What does a lawsuit about SecuROM damaging computers have to do with online-only DRM?
And this still has nothing to do with the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act.
You apparently have no idea what you are talking about.
Is EA going to sell us things like Big Ben, Eiffel Tower and The Empire State Building when "SimCity" can't simulate a city the size of London, Paris, or New York? I don't know if "SimCity" can even do 20 square blocks which isn't even a quarter of Manhattan.
Holy shit. I bet EA nailed plywood over their windows and staked a lookout on their roof after seeing this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9VClRhU404
I think SC5 is getting really bad rep for wrong reasons - no one seems to want to remember the answer Maxis gave to the online requirement: your PC is not doing the backend work for the city simulation - its cloud based now. SimCity 3000 had an incredible amount of math behind it, SimCity 5 is the same and there is so much more of it that it has been offloaded into the cloud.
So your $40 game is buying you unlimited access to more CPU power than your home desktop computer can provide?
How big are Maxis/EA server farms doing all that number crunching for the millions of people playing the game?
I've been looking forward to SC5's release for a while, but now I can't buy it. It's marks the end of one of my favorite game series of all time.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Makes you long for the days when the biggest uproar was about a one-time online activation...
+1 Disagree
I have been so looking forward to this game for so long. After Societies or whatever it was called sucked so bad this game looked like it was going back to the roots of being a stupidly detailed city building game. It was actually going to be the first PC game I've paid for in a few years, and now I am left disappointed :(
You ruined my day Slashdot, shame on you for making me an informed consumer. Jerks.
How about Assassins Creed? That had a similar requirement. It was all in the name of DRM, yet it took less than a week for someone to create a program that imitated the server. Yes that's right to play the cracked game there was a line change in the hosts file to redirect the request to the local machine and you simply ran the server software on the computer. The game was none the wiser.
Piracy happened. Legitimate users got screwed.
There is nothing sweet about cities in motion
It was pretty
that was it
the traffic patterns were shit
the people you moved had no impact on the game, the development was completely pre-planned, the game didn't respond to a thing you did, and there were so many bugs that traffic became a nightmare, cars would always stop on crosswalks preventing people from crossing the road, trucks couldn't turn left because they could never get enough time to do it, boats would stop for oncoming boats when they had enough time to go to the other side and come back twice, trams had weird collision physics so that when they were pulled into a station, well back from the road (going in the direction away from the road) somehow they had an invisible caboose that would block traffic for awhile. Every map was the same, start plopping subways and watch the money roll in.
Cities in motion failed in just about every department but the graphics
Creating a simple DRM system that ensures that 95% will buy the game and will not be impeding is fine.
I don't think so.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Yes, blame the pirates. The people who actually implemented the DRM had nothing to do with it! It's true! Really!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Really?
Thats what this game is limited to?
How in the fuck is this game SimCity then? Sounds more like SimSuburb.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
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
It is because everything associated with Dwarf Fortress is innately funny.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
You can make quite the argument in court that products of this nature need to come with a warranty of some sort, given that improperly made they can cause possible issues with the proper functioning of one's property and that tying that warranty to a service like origin or steam is illegal, and in fact the product should be unbundled from such restrictive software so that the publishers and game creators can be properly held liable.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I call BS. This has nothing to do with piracy, except as an excuse.
Game companies can't admit that piracy increases sales because it's the perfect scapegoat for additional profits (artificial expiration date, micro sales, targeted advertising, no secondhand market etc).
Look, if 3 people pirate a game (and it's a good game) they will recommend it to their peers, say 5 people each = 15 people. Of those 15, some will buy the game, talk to more peers etc. Eminem is rich because MP3 existed, not because of his talents alone.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/ea-wont-green-light-any-single-player-only-games-2012095/
Frank Gibeau:
"We are very proud of the way EA evolved with consumers. I have not green lit one game to be develped as a single player experience. Today, all of our games include online applications and digital services that make them live 24/7/365." Fire him, too, please.