EA Exec Claims DRM Is a "Failed Dead-End Strategy"

[The Artificially Prolonged]

What? Is the sky falling in? Are pigs flying? Are the lion and the lamb laying in peace together? And have EA had an seen the light and renounced evil?

*reads article*

...Oh dear... So what he is saying is that DRM is bad except when EA do it, then it's a creative choice and offering a service? Is that right? I'm not that fluent in PR bullshit.

"you don't always know what the customer is going to want. You have to innovate and try new things and surprise people and in this particular case that's what we sought to achieve"

Well I imagine would be hard for a in IP to gauge what customers want, it is probably much easier to do with a sequel to a long established series that has a large numbers of fans who would be quite willing to offer feedback on why they like the series. Plus I imagine if said customers where very vocal about features they did not like the sound from the moment they were announced, again I imagine it would easy to work out what the customer's actually wanted.

"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."

...

EA do yourself a favour and just gag all your execs so they can't talk.

 

[mjc0961]

Damn, here I thought for a second that maybe someone at EA grew a brain, but nope. Was on the right track with the whole "DRM doesn't work" part, but then veered right back off into stupid territory with "GOOD THING SIMCITY HAD NO DRM LOLOLOLOLOL!!!" Yes it did. There was no reason to exclude an offline mode

At what point does DRM stop being DRM and start being an integral component of gameplay?

Easy answer: when the game is actually a multiplayer game. When the entire point is to directly play with or around other people.

Here's another simple concept: taking a single player game and breaking it to force multiplayer aspects into it is not the same thing as an actual multiplayer game at all. It's just a broken single player game. And that's what SimCity is: a broken single player game. There's no excuse for it not to have an offline mode, and modders already proved that it works offline too.

Can we stop asking pointless questions about the differences between multiplayer and singleplayer and get back to letting companies know we won't stand for insanely intrusive always-online DRM that breaks the game now?

 

[Baresark]

I hope this can put a rest to all the shit where everyone was blaming EA for SimCity's shitty online service. Now both Maxis and EA have said that it's all on Maxis. That said, I doubt EA is going to stop using DRM.

Gibeau's statement leads to an interesting question: At what point does DRM stop being DRM and start being an integral component of gameplay? Using Steam as a template, it's arguable that EA could claim to have abandoned DRM simply by making Origin a requirement of using its games. It's semantics, of course, but it worked for Valve - could it work for EA too?

Valve doesn't say they aren't using DRM. Steam is a service and store as well as DRM. But Steamworks is referred to as "Steam DRM". If you purchase a game on Steam, you get a layer of Steamworks on top of whatever DRM is present from the developer. The difference between what Steam does and what Maxis did was worlds apart though. They put an always online connection so you are always jacked into some for of social service. You can effectively separate Steam as a service from the DRM. You can shut down the service aspect. Lots of games don't user Steam services in any way. But the DRM is always present, which in a lot of ways is a lot more honest than what Maxis did with their always on. It's a service, but it's compulsory and not optional at all. The DRM is what it is. I can't complain about it because my Steam library is massive.

 

[twesterm]

I would be a lot more open to the whole "it's like an MMO" story if it were actually like an MMO in any way at all.

1. You don't play with thousands or even hundreds of other players, you play with up to 15 other people in the largest region.
2. You never directly interact with other players. Never.
3. You can absolutely run an entire region by yourself.
4. You can absolutely run an entire region by yourself without being connected, the servers do nothing special.
5. I might believe that it's absolutely required to have all 16 cities in a region if one of the regions wasn't only two cities.

 

[JarinArenos]

The difference between what EA did here and what Valve wildly succeeds at? Functionality. Steam doesn't get in the way of my gameplay, it enables it (easy access to library, patches, great sales, etc). And guess what? I DON'T ALWAYS HAVE TO BE ONLINE TO USE IT. What a f***ing concept.

Of course, the issue that Sim City was a failure of a game at any level, online or off, keeps getting sidelined...

 

[blackite]

Apparently forcing you to constantly stay online isn't DRM, it's a FEATURE!

Hmm reminds me of one of EA's other games.

Spoiler

 

[Ashoten]

So this wasn't really an apology at all was it? More like a "Fuck you stupid consumers that wine when they do not get their way. You just don't understand how it works in business."

Well I hated EA before this but now they can go fuck themselves. I am going to personally boycot their products form this point forward and hope others do the same.

 

[faefrost]

Didn't the EA executive in charge of game development declare that he had not green lit a single player game in 2 years, and that in Oder to get made a game MUST be online to fit in with EA's vision? So yeah! Nobody from EA in any way forced Maxis to do this... Uh huh!

 

[finndor]

This is total bullshit. People did ask desperately for this to be made offline and it definitely seemed like something the devs had be asked not to address in their reddit ama.

(http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/14umm1/we_are_the_simcity_dev_team_from_maxis_amaa/)

The top comment lists heaps of people who asked for offline play and were meet with silence.

 

[GodzillaGuy92]

I don't think I've ever felt so elated at the start of an article compared to how disgusted I felt by the time I finished. If any good comes out of Riccitiello's departure, it sure hasn't taken hold back at EA yet.

 

[Defeated Detective]

I lost it at this part

an unavoidable consequence

This is where it's clear that this is one of the "apologies" Jim Sterling was talking about in his SimShitty episode. This is an apology that's aimed to appease people, but this one is actually more damaging since they are asserting that this is MANDATORY.

It's not, please, don't be fooled. We've played games without the need of being online for years and we can do so until now, don't let EA fool you with this.

 

[5mj7R7yf4Dwr3gdZyyu9PeGNwYjlNrjzuh3iTXQG]

Bullshit, bullshit [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121214/16262621391/simcity-developers-reddit-ama-swiftly-turns-into-wtf-with-online-only-drm.shtml]. The always online requirement for Sim City 5 was entirely about DRM, and then integrated into the game as justification. They knew it was a bad idea long before SC5 was ever released

The beta-testers and devs foresaw this disaster like it was a George Lucas prequel. They just couldn't tell Georgey (or whoever) that it sucked and needed revision without getting castrated, themselves.

EA has already proven it is fond of shooting messengers.

238U

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Sees article

Hey! It looks like EA have started to...

Reads article

...never mind.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

I would absolutely love an offline mode for MMO's.

When I play an MMO I hardly ever party up with people, I don't use the benefits of an MMO being online.

Anyway, didn't EA come out and say that they weren't going to greenlight games without a multiplayer component anymore? Maybe they never bluntly told Maxis that a Simcity without online features wouldn't fly, but I bet Maxis still felt pressured to make their game online. And sadly they went too far.

But, there is still a shimmer of hope here. Frank has admitted that EA have a problem, and that's apparently the first step to a turnaround.

 

[MPerce]

Oh, fun. Instead of "let's see what kind of DRM we can get into this game," it's going to be "let's see what kind of 'always-online features' we can get into this game. They oughta go into politics with that kind of sneaky word choice.

But then again....I could see how the always-online requirement came about in a non-DRM way. Maxis decided that this SimCity was basically gonna be an MMO, so the always-online makes sense in that regard. The problem is that nobody wanted a SimCity MMO. Those two things don't match. It's a neat idea as a side-feature, but the single player still should've been the focus.

Whatever happened behind the scenes, they goofed up. And it doesn't sound like they learned from it.

 

[FalloutJack]

But seriously, folks, EA is so dumb that they have been following word for word the entire book called "Failing for Dummies" they got at a bargain bookstore. At this point, I'm thinking they're deliberately screwing themselves up so that they can falsify an insurance claim on their company when it burns to the ground, stating that they didn't hace the DLC patch for the fire extinguishers. That's assuming, mind you, that the gamers in their area didn't do it for them!

*Rimshot!*

It's just getting too easy to make fun of these guys. It feels like Jack Thompson PLUS, like he secretly put together a team of likewise idiotic people to ruin...uhhh...gaming?

>_>

<_<

We know he's not involved here, right? Like...he's not on-call to defend them or anything?

 

[Sight Unseen]

This latest tactic of "DRM is bad, but this isn't DRM, it's an MMO" will likely propel the EA team to take gold in the Olympic 4 X 100 Backpedaling.

Let's be honest here, they have enough teams in this race to win Gold, Silver, and Bronze!

 

[GAunderrated]

EA never disappoints to stick their foot in their own mouth. Always online DRM is such a tainted word now with so many scandals the people at EA are probably working day and night to re-brand the term so they can continue business as usual.

 

[Signa]

Here's the part that gets me:

"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... you don't always know what the customer is going to want. You have to innovate and try new things and surprise people and in this particular case that's what we sought to achieve,"

So, what would be so hard about covering all your bases? Adding a singleplayer offline mode? We went through this exact problem with Diablo 3, where instead of building two separate game modes (a feat which was accomplished in Diablo 2 that no one complained about), they offered nothing but bullshit excuses as to why they didn't want to give the customers an option of what they might want.

This is why I'm trying to be done with the industry as it is now. It's easier to bullshit the consumer post-launch than it is to actually try to bring a product out that people will love. I guess if it's good enough to make money, you may as well sell it before you put more money into developing.