Andy Chalk said:
...Frank Gibeau, the president of EA Labels, who said at the Game Developers Conference this week that DRM just doesn't fly. "DRM is a failed dead-end strategy; it's not a viable strategy for the gaming business," he told GamesIndustry.
Which is nice, I guess... But, being an executive at EA, he of course couldn't say only that and then stop talking...
...but Gibeau said DRM never entered into the conversation - SimCity's connectivity requirement was simply an unavoidable consequence of "building a massively multiplayer experience."
...Which was why the game was a free Facebook release.
...Which was why the game was titled
Sim City Online.
...Which was to be expected, as every other game in the long-running series was an MMO.
Oh, wait, that's interesting- none of those things are true.
"What we tried to do creatively is build an online service in the SimCity universe and that's what we sought to achieve. For the folks who have conspiracy theories about evil suits at EA forcing DRM down the throats of Maxis, that's not the case at all," Gibeau said.
Y'know, Frank, this may be one of those sad cases where people are assuming this was a DRM decision because that's an easier motivation to understand for this kind of massive cluster-@$%#. "We're trying to prevent piracy" we get. "We're trying to make a game fun and popular by making it all but unplayable"? That's a little harder to wrap your brain around.
"At no point in time did anybody say 'you must make this online'. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience and when you're building entertainment..."
Maybe the creative people thought it was "best" because some suit at EA said
"I have not green lit one game to be developed as a single player experience. Today, all of our games include online applications and digital services that make them live 24/7/365."
And just to add to the hilarity, y'know who that suit
was, Frank? Look in the mirror.
"...you don't always know what the customer is going to want."
You could
ask... Or at least try to create a corporate culture where most departments don't yell "NAH NAH NAH NOT LISTENING!" whenever customers comment or complain...
"If you play an MMO, you don't demand an offline mode, you just don't. And in fact, SimCity started out and felt like an MMO more than anything else and it plays like an MMO."
My mind explodes in about five different directions.
How would you have known SimCity was intended to play "as an MMO" (as opposed to, say, any other kind of single- or multi-player experience) before actually playing it?
I admit I haven't played even a significant minority of the MMOs out there, but... are there a
lot of MMOs out there that play like
SimCity? Hell, are there even a handful, if we're talking about full commercial releases and not some free-to-play run out of South Korea?
Are there a lot of MMOs out there where some people's
first reactions were to try to improve the experience by making them single player? And found that they could indeed do so? And relatively easily, at that?
Did anyone creating the thing say, "Hey, this plays like an MMO"? And if they did, did that somehow not engender the reaction of "Alert! Alert! Pull back, this is going horribly wrong"?
Is Frank unaware of the link between "you don't know what the customer wants" and implying that the customer is somehow inherently
wrong for wanting an offline mode?
