Amazon has temporarily stopped offering digital purchases of SimCity, a move that's no doubt related to server-side issues which have plagued the game since its launch early this week. EA says it's working around the clock to patch up those problems, but in the meantime Amazon has cut off digital orders. The online retailer is still selling the boxed version of SimCity, however. But potential buyers of the physical copy are also being warned about SimCity's ongoing troubles. "Many customers are having issues connecting to the SimCity servers," the note says. "EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed." SimCity currently has a dismal rating of 1.5 stars on Amazon. As of this writing, 877 of 1,001 total ratings give the product just one star.

Fundamentally, SimCity has always been a 'software toy'. That means that there's no real end state, no way to win. It's just a thing that you play and experiment with. You build, and tinker, and mess around. It's a toy, not a game; it's a sandbox, not baseball.

So, in this iteration of the game, you don't even get to buy your toy. Rather, you rent a toy from EA, who lets you play with it only in very limited, circumscribed ways, only on their servers. So you have to have a live Internet connection at all times, and their servers have to be up, and have to have space for you. And the rules for play are draconian. If you want to, say, build a city, save it, blow it up with something terrible, and then restore from save, you can't do that anymore. That's an unauthorized usage of their toy. And if you figure out ways of using their toy that they don't like, they'll ban you forever.

All third-party modding is shut out. One of the best parts of SimCity 4 and The Sims is that users can create and share content among themselves for free. You will no longer be able to do this. You will be required to run only Official Authorized Content.

Further, you're not getting the whole game for your $60 or $80, depending on what version you're buying. EA's plan is to sell you Simcity 5 over and over and over. They've directly admitted that they already have it running with larger cities, but they're not releasing that now. They claim it's because it "won't run on Dad's PC", but the real reason is so they can sell it to you again later. Want subways? That's gonna be $20. Want railroads? Another $20. Bigger cities? Oh, that's in the $30 expansion.

Right now, if you look at The Sims 3, the game costs $30. But if also you buy all the DLC for it, it's *four hundred and seventy dollars*. This is what they are doing with SimCity 5; locking you into their server infrastructure, and then exploiting the heck out of your wallet.

This is a lousy deal, and you would be stupid to take it. Always-on DRM, and a deliberately crippled game, so that they can slowly uncripple it, charging you for every restored feature from prior versions.

Simcity 4 still works pretty well. It's not quite as nice as most current games, and can require you to 'pin' the process to just one processor on a multi-core system (ie, most current machines), but if you want a city builder where you won't have to pay extra to breathe both in AND out, that would be a better option.

But buying this game? In my opinion, you would be wiser to take three twenties out of your wallet, and light them on fire.

We Built This SimCity On A Shaky Foundation Of DRM

DARRELL ETHERINGTON
posted yesterday

EA’s anticipated SimCity launch has officially become a cavalcade of fail. Amazon is temporarily suspending sales of digital copies of the game in the face of massive negative buyer feedback, with the electronic title managing to accrue an overall rating of one star on the retailer’s site. This comes after EA disabled certain features to try to ease launch woes, and after it delayed the European launch by 24 hours to do the same.

By all accounts, the game itself is great. The problem is that EA decided to make sure that everyone, regardless of whether they wanted to play with others or by their lonesome selves, be connected to the Internet and EA’s SimCity servers in order to have access to the game. It’s the most insidious kind of DRM, in that it punishes legitimate players almost as much as it punishes pirates.

Rule number one of being a tyrannical game company fallen on hard times enforcing an outdated form of content copyright protection: make sure your servers can handle the load. EA has since said that it will bring in additional servers over the course of “the coming two days,” according to VentureBeat, and has already shut down the servers to install updates in an attempt to set things right. It’s also turning off leaderboards, achievements and region filters, hoping closing down non-essential elements will ease the network strain.

Of course, the irony here is thick. EA and Maxis are shutting down gameplay features in order to make sure that a title doesn’t really *need* to be online, can remain online anyway to keep the DRM component in place. From a blog post late last year, Maxis SVP Lucy Bradshaw defending the always-on connection (emphasis added):

Running the regional simulation on our servers is something we also use to support features that will make this SimCity even more fun. We use the Sim data to update worldwide leaderboards, where you get to see your city or mayoral standings as compared to the other cities in your region and between all of the regions in the world. And since SimCity is a live service, we’re also using the data to create weekly global and local challenges for our players that keep the gameplay fresh and surprising.


So when challenged on why SimCity has to have a constant connection to the Internet, even for single-player games, a senior Maxis executive highlighted the very features that the developer now has to disable just to keep the lights on. It was a thin excuse back then, and it’s about as thick as tattered onion skin now.

There’s absolutely no excuse for SimCity’s launch issues beyond simple short-sighted greed. Diablo III, a top-tier title put out by Activision Blizzard last year, faced the same kind of massive launch problems. The title sold well however, thanks in large part to the same kind of pre-order hype that benefitted SimCity, shipping over 12 million copies through the end of 2012. Active players were rumored to have declined quickly in the months following its launch, but the company recently said it’s turning its attention to Diablo III from perennial moneymaker World of Warcraft, so it can’t be doing too badly.

The sad truth is that EA, like Activision Blizzard before it, might not suffer that much material hurt from SimCity’s shaky launch, despite the outraged protest of frustrated Amazon reviewers. But here’s hoping it does, because this is bullshit.

We’re Ready for ‘Always Online’ — SimCity Wasn’t

By Matt Peckham

March 12, 2013

Back in 2004, a little company called Blizzard released a game — maybe you’ve heard of it. For nearly a decade, that game has run almost without fail, and the only way to play it has been with a persistent Internet connection. The dictate “always online” is part and parcel of the World of Warcraft package. Double-click the game’s Battle.net-based launch icon without an Internet connection and you’ll get nowhere. If you’re in a rare no-Wi-Fi coffee shop or on a flight without wireless Internet service, you can’t play. That’s simply how WoW rolls. If you find it confounding, well, you might as well expect your computer to run without electricity.

Ergo SimCity: There’s been some hand-wringing in the press about SimCity being an “always online” game, as if EA Maxis had been obligated to make some different game entirely. As a guy who prefers offline games, I sympathize with those of you mourning SimCity‘s metamorphosis from a game that’s playable anywhere to one that mandates an Internet connection. It is what it is. EA pulled no bait and switch here. Love it or leave it — and you can always leave it – SimCity was designed from the ground up as an online game. You don’t have to be WoW to justify doing this: We live in 2013, not 1993.

What isn’t justifiable is the way SimCity met its doting public last Tuesday, March 5. You’ve probably seen the news about the Hindenberg of a game launch, and if you’ve been trying to play the game, you are the news, intermittently dropped or unable to play at all. That, according to EA, is because the game launched with too few servers, or as EA Maxis honcho Lucy Bradshaw put it in the first of several official mea culpa blog posts, “a lot more people logged on than we expected … [more] people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.”

How EA screwed this up is anyone’s guess. How a corporate entity as massive as EA, with over 9,000 employees and operating revenue of over $4 billion annually, didn’t have all of its bases covered and safety nets deployed — not to mention redundant safety nets and extra bases and frankly entire batteries of failsafes — for the latest game in a series as patently popular as SimCity is astonishing. By contrast, when ArenaNet launched Guild Wars 2 last year, company president and co-founder Mike O’Brien was so adamant about maintaining a healthy player-to-server ratio that he told me he’d temporarily “turn off sales” if that’s what it took to keep the experience grooving (fortunately, despite Guild Wars 2‘s instantaneous popularity, this wasn’t necessary, and the game’s gone on to sell over three million copies to date).

Tom Chick perfectly captured SimCity‘s launch fiasco as only Tom Chick could in his one-star Quarter to Three review, noting:
To be fair, EA Maxis’ Bradshaw claimed on Sunday that “the core problem … is almost behind us” and that “players have been able to connect to their cities in the game for nearly 8 million hours of gameplay time and we’ve reduced game crashes by 92% from day one.” Though to be doubly fair, TIME Tech editor (and SimCity series sage) Doug Aamoth, who’s been trying to play the game since last week, confirmed to me this morning that throughout the day yesterday (Monday) he still couldn’t connect to the server in North America where he’d been working on several cities, and eventually had to resort to a server designated “Antarctica” (wherever that actually is…who knows) to start a new city.

I’m not convinced, as some seem to be, that we’re not ready for “always online” games. It’s not a question of can or can’t — we’ve been doing “always online” for over a decade — but of will or won’t, as in “Will game companies spend the time and money building out infrastructures capable of supporting players from the get-go?” While it’s annoying, we’re accustomed to spotty connectivity during an “always online” game’s preliminaries. But by the second or third day? Through the first week? Longer still? First impressions matter. All those one-star Amazon reviews – 1,667 out of 1,902 so far — are never, ever going away.

I can’t help but feel bad for EA Maxis. This is SimCity we’re talking about, one of EA’s flagship properties. I’ve interviewed Lucy Bradshaw about other EA games like Spore. I’ve spoken with few designers more enthusiastic about what they get to do for a living. I’m sure no one at EA Maxis planned to screw up the launch…and yet they did, badly. Let it be an object lesson: You can’t do “always online” half-baked (and if SimCity‘s launch is your definition of fully-baked, it’s time to reevaluate your criteria). If you’re trying to hedge server and support staff costs against the inevitable concurrent player drop-off that typically follows these launches, then for goodness sake rent what you expect to be redundant six months to a year down the line. Overcompensation should be the watchword here, not “good enough.” There’s simply too much at stake.