Well now that I know it is all stored online I won't even consider it. Bad enough Diablo 3 is like that, and I nearly didn't buy it for that reason. Shouldn't have to be online to play a single player game, that's fucking stupid.

LordHuffnPuff wrote:

Beach Bum wrote: Well now that I know it is all stored online I won't even consider it. Bad enough Diablo 3 is like that, and I nearly didn't buy it for that reason. Shouldn't have to be online to play a single player game, that's fucking stupid. Back in the day, there was a point where PC games started requiring an Intel chip to run. If you didn't have the right processor, the game wouldn't play. You obviously weren't going to go out and buy a whole new computer just to play that game, but those were the system requirements. Was that stupid? When Crysis launched, most computers couldn't run it because the video card wasn't powerful enough. It was literally impossible to run the product, even though you had paid for it, and it was a single-player game. Was that stupid? A constant internet connection is a system requirement for more and more games. I would be unsurprised to see it become standard in several years as it just becomes a thing that the consumer is presumed to have. This is no different from any other jump in system requirements. It's just the flavor of the month to hate it.

Yes everything you just listed there was pretty stupid. Bad business decision to cut yourself off from a chunk of the market, or in Crysis's case, almost the entire market.

I don't think it is ridiculous to want to be able to play a game if the internet goes down or you are away from a wifi network. Especially in a game that isn't even multiplayer. Okay I can get D3, they don't want people hacking their characters, whatever. But Sim City? Come on, what's the point?

It is just more heavy handed DRM that has probably done nothing but cause people who actually paid for it more trouble than it did the people who went online and stole it. They are so scared of piracy at this point that they are doing anything and everything to stop it and it is just leading to more piracy to avoid all the DRM bullshit you have to go through to play PC games these days. If it wasn't for Steam I'd have probably given up on it altogether, because it is getting to be a pain in the ass.

LordHuffnPuff wrote:

Beach Bum wrote: Yes everything you just listed there was pretty stupid. Bad business decision to cut yourself off from a chunk of the market, or in Crysis's case, almost the entire market. How would you suggest that developers push the envelope in terms of tech, then? If they can't raise the system requirements of their product, improvement is significantly harder (or at least significantly slower.)

How about the same way everyone else does it? You make the game playable on damn near everything made in the last 5-10 years on the lowest settings, even if runs like shit. Then you make it require pretty high end hardware to run on the very highest settings. Kinda obvious and it lets people upgrade as they have the money. You don't up and decide you hate AMD processors one day or NVIDIA cards or something and make your game not work with the hardware. You also don't make a game almost no one can run, because you will never make your money back on it. The people who made Crysis are lucky they managed to make enough to not go under.

LordHuffnPuff wrote:

Crysis sold over a million copies in the first three months, despite a poor initial sales week.

Yeah and just imagine how many they could have sold if they'd actually made it accessible to people with mid-range PCs. Also it was the most pirated game that year if I recall, probably because people had to download it to see if they could even run it before they bothered wasting their money since a lot of the time the system requirements don't necessarily mean you can't run it on slightly worse hardware, you just won't have good performance.

Also 1 million units isn't shit for a game, hell I think Skyrim had sold something like 3.5 mil in just the first couple days and like 7 mil or thereabouts in a week and that's an RPG. If I compare it to Black Ops 2, which is in Crysis's genre, it pushed around 11.22 mil in a week alone. Sure those are established franchises and multiplatform but you'd kind of expect even something that was hyped as heavily as Crysis to push more than a million copies in three months as an FPS, which is probably the most popular gaming genre, even as a PC exclusive at the time. Once again had they made the system requirements reasonable they could have developed for consoles and probably gotten significantly better sales since the consoles are more accessible than the PC for gaming. I think it didn't even make it to consoles until a few years back and it was heavily stripped down from the original so it would work.

My point is that it is stupid from both sides:

The consumer because they don't actually own the game they just own the right to connect to the server and most of these people are going to realize this whether it is because someone told them or because they figure it out on their own. They are essentially putting faith in the company that these servers won't go down tomorrow because EA decided they were too expensive due to poor sales or whatever. Or hell just because the server experienced some issues one day and now they can't play when they want to. It certainly hurts them more than Joe the pirate who can play whenever he wants, all he needs to do is use a free server or make one. I imagine that's already been done at this point and if not it will be done shortly.

The business because they should have realized the internet exists and will tell people it is stupid very, very quickly and essentially make the game lose sales through word of mouth. Probably why they've taken to making sure reviewers get optimum conditions so they give glowing reviews since someone probably saw this coming and tried to get some initial sales off critic reviews before people started spreading the word. Like I said I can see why Blizzard went this route, it is to help protect people from character hackers in D3 multiplayer, I get that. Plus Blizzard is a much more trustworthy company than EA, but that's beside the point. Sim City I don't get because the reason seems to be DRM and now they are costing themselves money to maintain unnecessary servers and it is pretty much guaranteed to be completely ineffective at stopping piracy.

So EA is now offering a free game if you buy this garbage and activate it on Origin before the 18th. I'm sure people would prefer their 60 bucks back.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/simcity-launch-dumb-electronic-arts-apology_n_2853690.html