Slashdot Mirror
In Wake of Poor Reviews, Amazon Yanks SimCity Download
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Geek.com: "In what must be a big blow for EA and Maxis, Amazon has stopped selling download copies of the just released SimCity. The game has at time of writing received 833 reviews on Amazon, and has an average rating of just one star. That's because 740 of those are one star reviews. Only 20 people gave it 5 stars. There's few better ways to gauge how a game has been received, and this is pretty damning as to how EA has handled the launch."
Alegedly it's not "just" DRM. EA has stated that their servers are handling some portion of the gameplay itself.
Anyway, it sucks that this game probably won't be playable after the servers inevitably go offline in a few years. Guess there's no room for nostalgia in the world of cloud computing.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I haven't had a single problem since I played the first time the night of the launch.
All the problems I've run into are simply the shitty game, itself, with all the problems everyone has already covered a thousand times over (social, regional stuff, tiny cities, crappy road system, inability to build an all inclusive city, etc).
After playing for a bit, I wanted to reset my city and start from scratch, again. I could not find any way to do it, whatsoever.
Eventually I got tired of it (probably about five hours worth of play, into it) and I don't know that I'll ever go back to it. I wasted my money and I regret it. I buy a lot of games and put up with a lot of let-downs as just part of being a gamer, but this one felt like a particular waste of money. Especially after all these years of being excited that someday we'd eventually have a new awesome Sim City game with all that having it on modern hardware would offer (which, as it turns out, is nothing).
Alegedly it's not "just" DRM. EA has stated that their servers are handling some portion of the gameplay itself.
They are. It's actually pretty damn good, when it's working. It's funny, because I didn't even know people were having problems until the /. article yesterday. I was too busy enjoying the game to see what other people thought about it.
In other news, a sequel to Planescape: Torment got funded on Kickstarter in 6 hours flat. It looks like the good guys are finally winning for once.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The only alarm bells that will be ringing over at EA is that Amazon is full of libelous astro-turfers from "the competition" and internet trolls who are jelly of EA's success. The "poor sales" will be seen as a sign that their new-angled DRM is working since most people are Pirates and can't handle their masterful security scheme.
It isn't poor sales that is closing it down... It is high returns and chargebacks.
People are going first to their retailer (Amazon) for a refund, then the factory (EA) then their banks (Amex,Visa,MasterCard) ... If they follow that, at one of the three steps they will get a refund. And the people to fit the bill at the end of the day will be EA (and I don't know if you have ever seen amazon chargeback fees...).
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Disclaimer; actually, it seems that EA may have been lying about the importance of the servers ain running Sim City. However, the principle stands (unfortunately); it should be possible to design software such that the client did the hard work, whereas the servers ran less intensive *but entirely critical and hard to replicate* code.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I've hated EA ever since back in 1985 when I bought a game for my C64 that hammered my 1541 disk drive out of alignment. It took about 5 minutes to load and you could fry an egg on the drive's cover by the time it was finished. I finally got the copy protection stripped out and it loaded in about 24 seconds just as smooth as silk. I haven't bought a game from those fuckers since. I can't believe they're still in business the way they've screwed over their customers and they are still at it today.