EA Offering Free Game to Users After SimCity Launch Problems

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EA Offering Free Game to Users After SimCity Launch Problems

Posted by Unknown on Saturday March 9, 2013 @05:00AM from the replacement-game-broken-too dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The SimCity launch earlier this week was a complete disaster. Single player games that require an Internet connection to enable forced multiplayer features (as well as acting as a form of DRM) is bad enough, but then to not be prepared for the demand such a popular franchise has, well, that's just dumb, and Lucy Bradshaw, EA's general manager for the Maxis Label, has admitted exactly that." They did not provide much details, but supposedly anyone who has SimCity now should get "a free PC download game from the EA portfolio." They are unrepentant about the always-online requirement though.

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Too little, too late by dreamchaser · 2013-03-09 05:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

EA has been producing crappier and crappier games and screwing over customers for years now. Their workers operate in near sweatshop (ok I wax hyperbolic, but it's not good) working conditions. They could give me their entire catalog for free and I still would never buy another one of their future titles.
1. Re:Too little, too late by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-09 05:30 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Don't pay to be a beta tester, and get an old game as a "reward'. Continue to ask for refunds, and dispute bank charges. Games shouldn't be rentals.
2. Re:Too little, too late by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-09 05:34 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  What's interesting is the date they've set for the claim:
  
  On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game.
  That date is over a week away, and almost two weeks from the initial release: why would they set it so far ahead? I guess the logical explanation for it is to allow for people who ordered a copy via snail-mail, but the cynic in me wonders if they're trying to bulk out the sale numbers with "look, it now comes with a free game, and you've got ages to join in! Please buy it! Ignore the bad reviews, think of the other game you'll get for free!".
3. Re:Too little, too late by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-09 05:40 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Yeah, how dare they expect a game to work at all on day 1! What a bunch of assholes!
4. Re:Too little, too late by DR.F33LG00D · 2013-03-09 07:36 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Lol, it's hilarious watching these companies spend billions trying to fight piracy. The pirates always get an easier version to install and play than the people who pay, and sometimes, we even get the release ahead of time. There is NO WAY to secure some code that is running LOCALLY on my computer. I mean, wtf do they think they can do...put a dll or exe that has a check to verify you are logged in the EA servers when playing single player and make it impossible to crack? Hackers will isolate that code, remove it, and/or put stub API calls to always return true for where it is doing the API call to their servers, and the whole "security by online verification" goes out the window. These kinds of patches are happening all the time with games today, with cracked versions being released ahead of time or at most within a day or 2 after the release. Guess who has to deal with the issues where the servers are down? Paying customers... Theoretically, if they ran everyone's installations on their servers and it was streamed to the customers local machines, I am sure hackers would still find a way to aggregate all the content and make a distro. Or, they would just hack the servers and get the source code. This is why content providers would embrace a service like On-Live as a means of distribution for their titles. It streams the actual rendered frames to the user instead of giving them access to the binaries that run the game. Too bad that us 'old-fasioned' gamers (god, I'm old...how did this happen) will never be happy with the input lag and other issues with a service like this. I tried beta testing on-live and literally LOLed at the irony of the fact that it errored out due to my video card not supporting shader model 3.0. I heard the beta testing they did was a complete failure, as expected, because no one can handle that kind of bandwidth yet. EA, Blizzard, etc. we've seen their servers fall to their knees during releases of major products. And On-Live somehow thinks they are going to be able to stream all this content to end users for all games without their servers falling to their knees? Yea right, not in the next 10 years. Yes, getting an ISO with a CRACK folder that I have to drag and drop over to the installation directory is such a trivial task that I find it easier than paying for a game from a local store, Amazon, or any other means of distribution available. With torrent speeds that max out my connection, from the right super secret sites, I can get games faster than downloading it from any content provider and have it running within 20 minutes from the point of clicking download. Steam is amazing, though. That's one service that I feel was done right. I use Steam for purchasing games that I want to play online with other people. So for now, torrents for single player games and steam for online games seems like the way to go.
5. Re:Too little, too late by Opportunist · 2013-03-09 08:44 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Actually, it's the one form of copy protection that will not only not work but actually drive customers away.
  Let's be frank here, what is happening now?
  1. People buy game.
  2. People try to play and fail.
  3. People search for solutions.
  4. People stumble upon someone telling them that the game has been cracked and that the cracked version works.
  5. People download cracked version.
  6. People play game.
  For other games, they'll just omit the (for them pointless) steps 1-4.
  
  --
  We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Vote with your wallet by Beavertank · 2013-03-09 05:05 · Score: 5, Insightful

There's an easy fix to this: Never, ever, ever buy a game that has always on DRM.

Eventually the game manufacturers will learn.
1. Re:Vote with your wallet by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-09 05:38 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  There's an easy fix to this: Never, ever, ever buy a game that has always on DRM.
  Eventually the game manufacturers will learn.
  We HAVE voted with our wallets. And we're getting clearly outvoted, else publishers and developers wouldn't keep doing it.
The better product by Groo+Wanderer · 2013-03-09 05:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

And they keep bitching at me when I write up that piracy has moved past "free" and now is about a demonstrably better product. Free is almost lost in the noise now. The state of modern consumer fleecing has gotten painful to watch.
Re:We are sorry our products are so shitty. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-09 05:22 · Score: 5, Insightful

You, sir, are an optimist.
The actual wording is pretty smarmy. Using the word portfolio leads one to believe one will be able to select any title from their portfolio. But read it carefully and you'll see not only does it not say that, it doesn't say you will have ANY choice as to which game.