EA Offering Free Game to Users After SimCity Launch Problems

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.

Comments

Too little, too late

[dreamchaser]

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.

Re:Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Too little, too late

[Penguinisto]

So in other words, EA is saying: "we're sorry you discovered that our product is complete DRM-ridden shit, so we want to allow you to download any of our outdated examples of complete DRM-ridden shit from our online catalog!"

I'm thinking that a lot of otherwise unconcerned folks are discovering the hard way that maybe DRM is a bad idea?

Nah - too much to hope for.

Re:Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

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!".

Re:Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, how dare they expect a game to work at all on day 1! What a bunch of assholes!

Re:Too little, too late

[History's Coming To]

This is why I've simply decided not to buy another EA game. Battlefield 3 was the final straw for me - 3 downloads of around 2Gb each in the first three months? Any you have to download them to continue to play online? And the patches required are only a few Mb and the rest is DLC which you have to download whether you want to pay to have it activated or not?

To top it all, when I tried to contact them to see if patch-only downloads were available (I'm on a slow connection that 6Gb of downloads would swamp) I was told I didn't have the right date of birth. I ended up having to use the UK Data Protection Act to get hold of my account details, and sure enough my DOB was correct. The data also included "customer offered 15% discount" - which was news to me.

I give up , I'm simply not going to buy another £40 coaster from them, I have enough of those.

Re:Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Games shouldn't be rentals.

Well, yes, but if tens or hundreds of millions of people support that business model, then it's going to succeed. The way to once again have games that don't require someone else's permission to play is to buy those kinds of games, not the kind that are DRMed out the ass..

You get what you ask for.

Re:Too little, too late

[History's Coming To]

Nice to know the employees are treated well. Any chance of asking them to do the same for their customers?

Re:Too little, too late

[spire3661]

It an unrealistic expectation that the game be made in a such a way that the offline use-case isnt ignored outright? This game was designed so that it cannot exist without EA servers, absolutely rubbish game design.

Re:Too little, too late

[Cito]

A triple A game company that gets it right is companies like EgoSoft who removed all DRM from their X3 franchise and has already announced the new X3 sequel will not contain any form of DRM at all.

DRM only hurts legit players and lags them up, making games unplayable for legit customers. And cripples PC gamers and PC's

There are quire a few triple A game companies that know DRM is shit and does not help at all against piracy and it only hurts legit customers.

People who buy SimCity 5 are total morons if they buy it knowing the DRM it has, cause in a couple years that 59 dollars goes in the toilet when EA unplugs the login server for SimCity 5.

they've already killed game servers as little as 2 years old in the past. Making money spent on the game totally useless.

Anyone who defends companies like EA or Ubisoft are just ignorant of the facts, and it's those 2 companies that are destroying PC gaming the most.

If I had a choice between piracy or selling my company to EA, I'd more than welcome the pirates. Cause Valve already published a study that games without DRM piracy HELPS sales, due to word of mouth advertising as well as most pirates will pirate for the single player action and fall in love with the title and buy it for online play or coop play or to support the developers in general if they enjoy the game as a try before you buy. Which was published by Valve that piracy helps pc game sales.

it's only companies that use draconian DRM that continue to lose money and eventually blame piracy when it's their own company shooting themself in the foot (See Ubisoft's CEO blaming piracy for last years sales drop, when in fact it was most their games requiring always on DRM such as AC series, Anno 2070, and most everything else they released this past year)

Re:Too little, too late

[Goaway]

Games shouldn't be rentals.

But they are going to be, because this is the one and only form of copy protection that can actually work. Publishers are not going to give that up any time soon.

Re:Too little, too late

[Pharmboy]

Actually, this is one form of copy protection that DOESN'T work. The fact is, I was all ready to buy the game. I actually buy all my games, haven't pirated one in forever. (I'm old, employed, $60 is no biggie).

Now I won't buy the game simply because I couldn't play it if I did, and I don't want a game that forces me to save games online, be online when I play, can't be played on an airplane or in the car, etc. And it will stop working once they get tired of hosting the servers.

I've bought every SimCity game ever made and many other sim games from Maxis. Paid money, not pirated. 1, 2k, 3k, 4, Societies, Sim Copter, even Sim Tower and The Sims 1 and 2, simant, simfarm, and so on. I just can't buy this in good conscience because I don't know if I will be able to use it like I wanted to. And that is sad, since I love their games. Maybe, just maybe, I will buy it if someone comes out with a cracked version, and just use the cracked version. I don't mind spending the money, I just don't like being treated like a criminal once I've given them the money. At least with Steam, I can play most games offline and on different computers.

Re:Too little, too late

[DR.F33LG00D]

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.

Re:Too little, too late

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Too little, too late

[AxemRed]

SimCity had a closed but free beta. I participated in it. There were no requirements that you preorder the game or purchase anything else.

Re:Too little, too late

[Darinbob]

This DRM is not about preventing piracy,. DRM in games has never been about piracy. Pirates aren't slowed down by this at all. The sole purpose of DRM in games is to prevent your legal rights to resell the games you purchased. Publishers are more afraid of game resales than piracy. Preventing resales will keep the prices of the game higher, and the publishers know this, from EA to Valve (there are no good guys in the DRM world).

Consider that if you were allowed to sell your crappy copy of SimCity 5 that the market would be flooded with cheap copies by now from the disgruntled customers, from $5-10. From eBay to bargain bins to just giving the game to unsuspecting friends. Consider that after all this screw up the game is still selling for FULL PRICE! $59.99! Note also that the physical copy is also $59.99, you get not even one single cent of discount for buying the digital copy, savings are not passed on to you.

The most amazing thing is that the same customers being screwed by DRM are also fans of it and will promote it. Just like you are implying that publishers have to do this, if you repeat this lie long enough customers will believe it.

They obviously thought...

[Zemran]

... that with all that really bad DRM shai'te no one would actually buy it... so they were not prepared for actual sales.

Vote with your wallet

[Beavertank]

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

Eventually the game manufacturers will learn.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[meerling]

"Vote with your wallet" does NOT work unless you can get a massive portion of the entire market to participate. (Or more accurately, refuse to participate.)
All the retailer sees is a slight dip in sales for campaigns that start after something has been on the market for a while. If it's a new product, sales just aren't as high as they could be, but the retailers have no idea what it could have been.
Not buying the product is INVISIBLE TO THE RETAILER. Unless, as I stated earlier, you can virtually wipe out all sales, something that is virtually impossible. (Ebola plague juice being an exception.)

Here's the best way to get it through their thick adamantium plated marketing spin enhanced skulls. COMMUNICATE!
Email, in large enough quantities, can get their attention. However, some companies kind of ignore or filter that stuff, and besides, they are wary of scriptbots spamming them.
Dead Tree Format Snail Mail may be old fashioned, but companies will pay a LOT more attention to it. I've seen email campaigns that got thousands of responses that got ignored, when a letter writing campaign of 60-80 letters got an immediate and positive response for the same issue.

Here's another hint. Don't attack, insult, or threaten them. That's another fast way to get you attempt neutralized, and maybe even get some cops knocking on your door. That doesn't mean you can't tell them what you don't like, how you feel about it, and what you think is a better idea, just be polite and civil about it.
You see, the person reading the mail, usually isn't the person in charge. Though they may forward your mail up the chain of command. Attacking that person is NOT going to help you, in fact, that kind of stuff usually makes them roundfile your letter. (Yes, that means throw it away, or if that's illegal, throw it into the dusty box in the backroom that nobody ever looks in.)
You being an impolite thug with lots of profanity and the like will get a similar response to attacking people.
And I wish I didn't happen to mention it, but don't make threats. Either physical or legal. Physical threats will get you in a permanent troublemaker file where you will be ignored by everyone except the police. And yes, they do occasionally respond to these kinds of threats with investigations and arrests.
As to legal threats, they are a different problem. You may get ignored, depending on the details, but most likely you will get sent to the legal department that will decide how valid your threats are, and proceed from there. As to proceeding from there, nothing will ever happen until the legal paperwork for a court date or whatever shows up. You can't bluff a lawyer with legal threats, you actually have to follow through, and of course, taking legal action against a company is not what writing to them is for. Legal threats will get even less attention from a company than physical threats, and neither one will advance your cause.

One final note for everyone. A well written letter is good, but a thousand identical letters isn't a thousand times better. Have a skilled writer make a template or example for people to use, but everyone should personalize it to make each letter unique, but clear and to the point. After all, the same exact letter over and over will just be treated as spam.

That's about all I can say, other than I'm as sick of hearing people say vote with your wallet, because it just doesn't work.

We are sorry our products are so shitty.

[pclminion]

In order to make you feel better, please choose one of our other shitty products. Two shitty games are better than one!

Re:We are sorry our products are so shitty.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Free Single Player?

[grim4593]

A free single-player version of the new SimCity game would be nice.

The better product

[Groo Wanderer]

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.

EA's Lucy Bradshaw's post

[SternisheFan]

POSTED BY Lucy Bradshaw ON Mar 8, 2013 A SimCity UpdateAnd Something For Your Trouble

Here’s a quick update on the problems we were experiencing with SimCity – and a little something extra for people who bought the game.

The server issues which began at launch have improved significantly as we added more capacity. But some people are still experiencing response and stability problems that we’re working fast to address.

So what went wrong? The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.

OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent. It’s working – the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically. The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent.

So we’re close to fixed, but not quite there. I’m hoping to post another update this weekend to let everyone know that the launch issues are behind us.

Something Special for Your Trouble (see linked page at bottom of post)

The good news is that SimCity is a solid hit in all major markets. The consensus among critics and players is that this is fundamentally a great game. But this SimCity is made to be played online, and if you can’t get a stable connection, you’re NOT having a good experience. So we’re not going to rest until we’ve fixed the remaining server issues.

And to get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio. On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game.

I know that’s a little contrived – kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.

SimCity is a GREAT game and the people who made it are incredibly proud. Hang in there – we’ll be providing more updates throughout the weekend.

http://www.ea.com/news/a-simcity-update-and-something-for-your-trouble

Re:EA's Lucy Bradshaw's post

[Anonymous Coward]

So what went wrong? The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.

Beta tester here: Maybe if their beta lasted longer then 24 hours they would have seen this coming.

Pet Hotel Tycoon!

[BenJeremy]

I expect, given EA's greed, that this will be the "free game" they give to every victim of their ineptitude. ...that or they'll give away free copies of Star Wars: The Old Republic

Would have liked to play it...

[Loki_666]

but I'm already boycotting any always connected games or any other product. I can live without, plenty of other good games available, plus my back catalog of awesome games that i always go back to, and thanks to visualization, i can always return to even the oldest ones.

After the Bioware debacle where they disabled their authentication servers (fortunately games still playable online) and Gamespy shutting down their old servers (without the publishers releasing patches to enable online matchups without gamespy - eg: Marvel: Ultimate Alliance), I'm totally against any form of always-on connection.

I'm not even willing to trust Steam now. I believe Gabe is a good man, and as long as he is at the helm things will be cool, but one day he will be gone, and when the first profit oriented CEO takes over, it will just turn into another EA or Ubisoft, and at that point, support for old games will suddenly disappear, and one by one, those games you paid for will no longer work. Or at least that is my guess... i'm not willing to risk it. I want the games i bought to be mine.

This is why I don't buy games very often.

[ChangeOnInstall]

I have the income to buy them. I have the desire to play them. I have the computer hardware to play them. And I won't pirate them.

But I won't pay you $50 or $60 and be rewarded with the very kind of stress that I've purchased the game to temporarily escape from. You're not going to stop the pirates, but you are going to stop me.

Consolation: You get a game you don't want?

[HalAtWork]

What sense does it make to give SimCity players another game from EA that they probably don't want? My dad got this game and he's not interested in playing Dead Space or whatever else, he only wants to play SimCity. They should just fix the problems the game has in the first place and allow "offline single player mode" a.k.a. normal fucking single player mode like any other game has.

Re:Reality

[xstonedogx]

Which is to say EA hasn't learned at all. I'd love a new SimCity game, but I won't buy it in this state. So not only did they spend the money to make it unplayable, but they lost some numbers of sales. I am hard-pressed to believe the *real* losses from piracy (i.e. those who would buy the game, but don't) are greater than the losses they are creating for themselves.

Spectacularly defeats the purpose of DRM too

[Moraelin]

You know, it just occurs to me... their problem with piracy and with second hand games is that someone gets to play one of EA's games, and EA doesn't get paid for it.

So let me get this straight, the result of putting the idiotic DRM in SimCity, is... that now a LOT of people get to play one of EA's (other) games, and EA doesn't get paid for it.

Sure, most of those wouldn't have bought the other EA game, but then neither would have most pirates. That is, outside of putting the BS in BSA.

But if you do the the maths BSA style, where every single copy downloaded is a lost sale -- and you just know whoever came up with that over-the-top DRM is -- yeah, great job, EA. Did you need a scope to shoot yourself in the foot so neatly, or is it a natural talent?

No, seriously, releasing SimCity without DRM would have probably resulted in less people playing an unpaid copy, AND saved them from all the negative publicity and angry customers.

Actually, I think they did consider the use-case

[Moraelin]

Actually, considering how the game works, I'm 100% convinced that it's the result of EA considering the single-player case... except in EA management lingo that use-case sounds a bit like, "OMG, gazillions of people will pirate our game, or buy it used on EBay."

Seriously, the game IS at heart a single player game. I've managed to squeeze in between server crashes and start a game or two, and guess what? The game functions exactly the same when the server crashes while you're in your city.

The lie that the game is too complex for a single CPU and they need to do server-side processing too, was just that: a lie. The only "server-side processing" they do is saving the game and publishing your game events.

But here's the funny thing: Steam for example manages just fine to send your achievements to the server in the background, without needing the game to be tethered to a server all the time. Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, A Game Of Dwarves, etc, take your pick, they're all single player games that Steam can both provide DRM for and save the achievements (and for some even the save games) on their server without pretending it's an online game.

So anyway, the game IS perfectly able to run single player. It's not a real client-server product like WoW or EA's own TOR. It doesn't need a server or a server emulator to play exactly the same. It's a single player game, which is perfectly able to function without a server, plus some artificial tethering to their servers that doesn't really add much.

So why IS a single player mode missing at least as an official option to start the game, when the game functions perfectly well in single player?

It seems to me like the only reasonable explanation is that they considered single-player offline mode as something to prevent.

DRM is the least of the problems...

[Shakrai]

DRM is the least of the problems with this game. They took what is inherently a single player game and turned it into social networking garbage. The online only model deprives you of the ability to play Sim City on the train, airplane, or litany of other unconnected places where you might want to play by yourself to pass the time. It deprives you of the ability to save your game, blow the city to hell with disasters, and resume playing afterwards. People might laugh at this, but that has been a huge part of the Sim City experience since the very first release in 1989. The servers don't speak to each other, so if you create a game on server A and have to use Server B tomorrow you can't play the city you spent hours creating. All of this is a huge problem, and that's without taking into account the DRM and completely inadequate server infrastructure.

The server model doesn't even make financial sense for EA -- ongoing expense for a one-time sale -- unless of course they intend to turn this game into a bunch of downloadable content where they "add" features (that have existed since Sim City 2000, i.e., subways and large maps) every few months for $20 a pop. This is almost certainly their plan, because it's the only way the server model can work without becoming a money pit.

I have played this game since I was ten years old and got the SNES version for Christmas. My sister and I used to spend hours in the public library playing Sim City 2000 before we had our first PC, saving our games on 5.25" floppy disks so we could play again tomorrow. I met many of my online friends -- most of whom I still communicate with -- through an old Majordomo mailing list that I found in a book about Sim City 2000. Hell, Sim City 2000 got me online in the first place. I learned how to make my own scenarios with nothing more than a hex editor and patience. I ignored the eye candy and stupid crossovers with The Sims in Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4 because they were at least smart enough to improve upon the underlying simulation model and keep it true to the franchise.

Disappointment does not begin to describe my feelings about this game, which was the first video game I've shelled out my coin for in five years. No, I'm not a pirate, I've just lost interest in gaming in general as I've aged, but this one had me genuinely excited in spite of my concerns about the online model and DRM. Guess I should have known better. I was one of the lucky ones, got a effortless (except for waiting two hours in chat queue) refund without any argument even though I bought it from Origin. Saved me the hassle of doing a credit card charge back, which is something I would highly recommend for anyone who can't get a refund through other channels. Vote with your wallet, it's the only thing EA understands.

Well, that much is clear

[Moraelin]

Well, that much is clear.

In fact, here's a thought: they said that the processing was so complex, they had to do some of it on their servers. But... if my still fairly top of the line 4 cpu / 8 thread Intel couldn't do it... what was EA going to do that actually makes a difference? Add one more CPU of their own for everyone who plays at a given time? Yeah, I'm so going to believe that they'll buy a 1 million CPU server farm just to handle everyone at launch. NOT.

So, yeah, it was clear that they're just shovelling ridiculous BS and hoping that enough morons would actually believe that.

The sad part, though, is that I've actually seen morons repeating it in excuse of the crashing servers fiasco.

Actually, now that makes me wonder

[Moraelin]

Actually, now that I said that only morons would believe EA's BS about the CPU not being enough for their game, and that they're actually processing your city on the server... it kinda makes me wonder if they ARE trying to get morons as a target demographic.

I was reading a paper a few months ago about Nigerian widow scams and such. The question they had basically asked themselves was: why those scams don't try to be a little less ridiculous and more plausible? Why don't they try to snag more people?

Their conclusion was that basically the scammers don't really want everyone. They actually want only the morons, who are more likely to then go through with it. If a smart person gets tipped off that it's bogus... GOOD! That's one less dead end to waste time on.

So I'm thinking, hmmmm, maybe that's EA's plan. Maybe they do want to reach the morons. More morons with money probably means more crap DLCs sold down the line :p