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

[Callate]

...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?

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Wow, I know the whole 'EA is evil' thing is overused and unfair, but when they keep coming out with statements like this which are just bafflingly petty doublespeak and 100% barefaced cheek you just have to stare slack-jawed.

The sheer shameless, conceited contempt this statement shows is mind numbing. He knows he is talking absolute bollocks, he knows Simcity uses DRM, and he knows that it has been badly implemented and the cause of most of the troubled launch of this game. He also knows that we know this, and for him to come out with such a pig-ignorant excuse that EA/Maxis have done nothing wrong because of an [incorrect] use of semantics on the differences between DRM and necessary online connections... it's insulting to my core as a gamer and a customer.

I'm glad I stopped buying EA games a long time ago.

 

[l3o2828]

Season 6 episode 8 of Southpark.

Everything EA says reminds me of THAT.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

PUT THIS MAN IN CHARGE OF THE DAMN COMPANY RIGHT NOW.

First bit of common sense I've seen displayed by anyone in EA.

That said, he's still by no means a regular human being in terms of common sense. I hope they learn from the reactions of players and decide not to make the next one compulsorily multiplayer, even making the assumption that that was a design choice not influenced by EA. People don't want to build a tiny city that has to specialise in one service or product and become dependant on other cities to function, and don't want to have to be online the whole time. It isn't an MMO, it's a single player game that has been altered to mandate multiplayer, in the process limiting what an individual player can practically do. Not that I particularly care, my views are mainly out of sympathy for those who are invested in the series.

 

[sXeth]

Well, the fact that you could disconnect it as easily as you can does somewhat hint that it wasn't intended as a DRM measure. EA may not be great at PR, or Innovating Games, or recognizing demographic concepts, but I doubt their tech department is inept enough to try and copy-protect something with a trivially hacked java script.

I can also very easily buy that EA leaned in and said the game had to have an MP component to appeal to a "broader multiplayer gaming demographic", and the half-assed implemented MP component of Simcity is the result of that.

Either way (or even if Maxis just had more ambition to make an MP game then actual talent or ideas), they're still the twits who, even after Diablogate, didnt bother putting up enough servers to handle their product.

As to the more general topic, DRM has never really worked, as those seeking to pirate seem to quite readily outnumber the poor slogs trying to code methods to stop them. Whereas quality products have managed to pick up sales (alongside the pirated copies) in fairly impressive numbers, and build loyal customer/fan bases. Which we're now seeing pay off significantly with some of the recent waves of Kickstarters for franchises and developers who've established that relationship.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

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

Why does this remind you of TOR? Unlike Simcity, TOR actually is an MMO. No-one expected to be able to play it offline.

 

[Timzilla]

If the whole point was to make an MMO like game, then why not just add an "Online" subtitle? That way atleast the consumer has an idea what the focus is and what they're getting into. Is anyone really gonna complain when "SimCity:Online" needs a connection?

The issue is that Simcity is really not a MMO.... like at all. Civ 5 is more of a MMO then SimCity because atleast then you're interacting with other people when you play online.

I read the Title and thought "OMG they finally read the paper I wrote years ago on how nothing positive can actually come from DRM!" then I read the article and remembered that this was EA and that this was another PR scam trying to weasel out of the shit storm that rages around EA's higher rung.

They claimed in this and a couple other interviews that designed this SimCity with more of a focus on multiplayer. Now, whether or not that was a good idea for a sequel to a game that was a single player experience (See Sims Online), that was there focus during development, hence the small city spaces and the need for sharing resources. All Im saying is they could have made this more of a "spin off" kinda thing, like Ultima online back in the day or Ghost Recon online more recently.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I know this is completely off topic, but the dude in the news thumbnail (From the main page) is cute . Really, really cute.

Look at taht.

You're right, I can't help but trust EA again.

I wonder if this means they will be cancelling Origin.

 

[Siege_TF]

EA has a long history of talking the talk, and failing to walk the walk. Almost like it's some kind of ploy to make them look less villianus.

 

[Altorin]

as shocked as Maxis seems to be by all this, I'm actually going to give them the benefit of the doubt. their game is still massively flawed due to actual design choices though, even giving them the "we didn't mean to make DRM, we only wanted to have an online experience" argument.

 

[Karathos]

Flat-out DRM does not work, true. Anything company execs in gaming say, I pretty much -always- take with a truckload of salt, but still nice to read I suppose. People complaining that always-online is DRM - in a way, yes it is. But on the other hand it is the developer's choice to create a game they want. Unless I'm mistaken, I'm pretty sure Maxis never said SimCity would have a playable offline mode prerelease. Pretty confident Blizzard never said that for Diablo 3 either (offline or LAN, in the case of D3).

We can argue day and night about all this, and it would all be 99% semantics. The basic fact remains that such games as Diablo 3 and the new SimCity were made with online play in mind. As such, the new SimCity requires you to be online. Boohoo waah. Vote with your wallet, and don't buy it. Unless a developer outright lies pre-release (see also, Aliens: Colonial Marines demo) I don't see what the massive goddamn hissyfits are about. Just DO NOT BUY PRODUCTS FROM PEOPLE YOU DON'T WANT TO SUPPORT. That's what I do.

Personally I don't care if the always-online stuff is because they honestly wanted the game to a more online experience, or if they just wanted to use that as DRM. Both things achieve the exact same thing; the only difference is the reason they give you. (In before: BUT THEY LIED AND THAT'S NAUGHTY D

 

[NoeL]

At first I thought he was legitimate, and I still believe he somewhat is (that SimCity was designed to be an MMO, though the ended up making it pretty light on the MM aspects). It seemed oddly familiar to me... then I remembered something I saw on youtube the other day:

Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IAhDGYlpqY]
and the response:
I Hate Religion, And Jesus Too [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBo7Z_abiLE]

It's always risky going off on a religious tangent so please try to resist hijacking the thread if you disagree (you're more than welcome to PM me), but this is the same marketing campaign as modern Christianity. No one likes religion - not even the Christians. The word "religion" is tarnished, so what do you do? Just replace it with a word that sounds better but ultimately refers to the exact same thing!

"It's not a religion, it's a 'relationship'".

"It's not DRM, it's an 'online service'".


(Note: Didn't mean to hate on Christianity there, just noting the similar PR strategy)

 

[weirdee]

"See guys, we're on your side! Granted, before the other side was us, but now that we're fighting against the big...something that isn't us together, you can totally trust us! Simcity being online only wasn't even about DRM and the whole thing was their decision with no influence on our part, even if some silly old modder got it to work offline...hey, what are you doing? Stop trying to look back there, we're not crossing our fingers or anything like that!..."

Frankly, if we were to hurl all of the EA bullshit artists into the sun right now, not a single person would care. The fact that they have to hire people specifically to polish their turds is the sign of a broken company.

(on the other hand, they must have some interesting business cards)

 

[danon]

Nah guys you got it all wrong it was creative people wo wouldn't let players choose a easily implementable single player. We started making it and then the creative guys ninja kicked us in the face. We were like dudes what's up and they were like players can't choose lol. And that's why art players no drm not evil what?

 

[weirdee]

The really sad thing about all this is in the two scenarios I can think of, one of them involves actually being aware that what they're doing is bad and they're just trying to appear good by saying the thing they should actually be doing, and then trying to slip a roofie under it, and the other being that they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about or doing at all, and they're just saying things that were recommended to them by script writers.

 

[Something Amyss]

Well that nicely demonstrates how out of touch (or desperate, delusional) EA's head honchos are.

Our DRM isn't DRM, it's a service!

No Frank, Origin and Simcity's 'vital' online connection are not services, they are DRM, arbitrary walls between customer and product. This is why I'm don't buy your games you idiot.

Sadly, it sounds like a lot of people will take away the notion that this represents some sort of sea change for EA, rather than just trying to advertise why their DRM is good DRM by a non-DRM name.

 

[Asuka Soryu]

EA: DRM only fails when others do it, when we do it, it's not DRM!

 

[MammothBlade]

What on Earth? April Fools is three/four days away. Calling it.