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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.