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SimCity's Empire Has Fallen and Skylines Is Picking Up the Pieces
sarahnaomi writes: Colossal Order's SimCity-like game, Cities: Skylines, sold more than half a million copies in its first week. The first 250,000 of those were sold in the first 24 hours, making it the fastest-selling game its publisher, Paradox Interactive, has ever released. Only a week before Skylines was released, game publisher Electronic Arts announced that it was shutting down SimCity developer Maxis' studio in Emeryville, which it acquired in 1997.
"I feel so bad about Maxis closing down," Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen said. "The older SimCitys were really the inspiration for us to even consider making a city builder." At the same time, Hallikainen admits SimCity's mistakes were Colossal Order's opportunity. "If SimCity was a huge success, which is what we expected, I don't know if Skylines would have ever happened," she said, explaining that it would have been a harder pitch to sell to Paradox if the new SimCity dominated the market.
"I feel so bad about Maxis closing down," Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen said. "The older SimCitys were really the inspiration for us to even consider making a city builder." At the same time, Hallikainen admits SimCity's mistakes were Colossal Order's opportunity. "If SimCity was a huge success, which is what we expected, I don't know if Skylines would have ever happened," she said, explaining that it would have been a harder pitch to sell to Paradox if the new SimCity dominated the market.
I can work around em, but yea... when my trains all get piled up it is a problem...
and cars going to the right lane miles before their exit causing a backup with cars merging on is a problem too...
One thing to be aware of: Cities: Skylines mod support includes a full C# compiler and does not run in a sandbox. It has the potential to install malware on your machine.
I read the internet for the articles.
It didn't help that even the parts EA wasn't squeezing for cash(at least not visibly) were also pretty unexciting:
Teeny-tiny cities, 'agent-based' simulations that purpoted to simulate realistic people and then delivered inchoate little ants that stumbled around randomly filling dwellings and jobs as they bumped into them, cryptic and at times deeply inscrutable simulation behavior.
A pure cash grab would actually have been better: Take a mixture of SC2000 and SC4000, implement in any reasonably contemporary 3d engine, sit back and dribble out new art assets, building types, and assorted other flavor as DLC. That would have been overt creative bankruptcy; but it would have been a basically sound game.
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Steam is certainly not without its drawbacks.
However, as a gamer, and even as someone who is profoundly wary of DRM schemes, I find that Steam at least offers some advantages to me, the user. Once I purchase a game, I can download it to any machine I like, so if I get a new computer, or my old hard drive crashes, I still have all my games. I can even delete games I'm not playing to save disk space, and reload them later if I so feel like it. I can get updates and fixes quickly and seamlessly. It may be relatively minor, but it's something that the service offers me. It's also very easy to find and buy new games, new expansions for ones I have, etc.
In turn, I'm tied to the service for those games, but the restrictions have not proven intrusive to me in my regular playing. I can play offline, and really haven't had any problems with that. About the only thing I've found I can't do is play two online games at once on two computers side by side - but I can play one offline while the other is online.
Now, you may find the tradeoff isn't worth it for you, and that's certainly fair - but at least Steam offers something to the user, where most DRM schemes are solely hassles to the customer for the benefit of the company (Ubisoft, EA, etc).
It's a lot of fun and it runs on Linux. For me I've been getting really bad frame rates, particularly when zoomed in. Apparently the developer is working on Linux performance.
What's sad is that so many beautiful women are really so shallow they'll throw themselves at men like EA CxOs just because of the bucks.
If you're that paranoid, run separate instances. One that you use online for purchases and downloads only, then copy the Steamapps subfolder for your game over to your offline-gaming instance. No achievements, no gameplay tracking, etc. An inconvenience, sure, but a fairly minor one.
I do this to keeps games sync'ed between my gaming PC and my laptop for traveling, but IIRC there's nothing that'll prevent you from having two copies of Steam installed on one PC.
The mere existence of DLC - even day-one DLC - does not mean the content would otherwise have appeared in the base game.
This. So many idiots seem to be under the impression that if the concept of DLC did not exist, developers would just create all the same content, but release it for free. In reality, if the concept of DLC didn't exist, they would not create that content at all, and base games would actually probably be smaller, as the promise of future revenue from higher profit margin DLC will often make publishers more inclined to increase the budget on the base game.
Because most of the traffic problems are a result of poor planning, like a real city, and not a result of heavy restrictions like SimCity. Sure it takes a while to create a proper interchange with all the correct on, and off ramps. Well a while until you figure out that all interchanges are a variation of a round about with some pieces removed and an over pass. Too much traffic is a good indication of not enough Interchanges, or connectors. Each industrial area requires its own interchange, or you're looking at an actual traffic nightmare. Just think about the city you live in, and how many highway connectors you have, and what each connector gets you to. Many cities have a highway connector just for their major mall. Don't make huge industrial areas because a single connector wont be able to service them all.
As a gamer, with a gamer wife and a gamer son, I LOVE steam. The ability to share game purchases within my family by using the Steam app is just GOLD. The only games that we need to buy multiple copies of are online games we want to play together. Offline games, mostly adventure games, we just take turns and let Steam Family Sharing work it's magic.
Once upon a time, I worked for EA.
The managers from EA were obsessed with the milestones.
What was important was not the game, but the progress towards its completion, so we had a fixed schedule, and we had to deliver the game at these schedules.
If you screwed your schedule, you were dead, since they paid when a milestone was reached.
It was pretty arbitrary.
The game was cancelled before its end, once they realized that it was not even amusing and probably also because they killed games that had no commercial potential.
I doubt they changed much since this time.
I remember EA back in the Apple ][ days. They made some awesome games of clearly higher quality than everyone else. I remember reading how they set up to achieve that, because they were dissatisfied with the products they were seeing.
Something changed pretty radically.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Same thing that always happens once money and greed become the goal instead of the ideals and the art. Anything that gets too big is inevitably affected by this situation, whether it be companies, cities, or governments.
Then harden up and just play them.
Steam is the only digital distributor I'd actually use (and aside from the occasional GoG purchase, I haven't bought from anywhere else in the last 5 years). They're not obnoxious (Uplay, Live Games, Origin), it's a nice lightweight client, they keep everything up-to-date, upload only game-related stats and it's in Valve's best interest to keep the source data to themselves.
I'm not overly concerned with game developers knowing that X people have played Y or more hours of their game and Z have earned such-and-such achievement. That seems like a great idea.