EA's Latest Attempt To Destroy SimCity Franchise: Micropayments For Hammers And Nails And Supplies

from the reticulating-splines dept

Let me tell you a story. Two years ago, the world's most hated video game company, Electronic Arts, decided to lay waste to one of the greatest franchises in history: SimCity. It did this in multiple ways. First, it pretended like the game's structure required an always-on internet connection, even though that wasn't true. Then EA failed to properly plan for the launch-day success it somehow managed to have, which meant that the required but not necessary internet connection was causing game servers to fail all over the place and rendering customers into would-be-game-players. The company was then voted as the "Worst Company In America" in a Consumerist poll. As a result of all that backlash, EA reformed its ways and released a mobile version of SimCity that is both customer friendly and stays true to the franchise's roots as a thank you to all of its loyal fans.

Haha, just kidding, EA totally fucked it up again. Their mobile game breaks the SimCity game mechanics and models entirely in favor of timer- or micropayment-based resource collection. And when I say resource collection, I mean on a level that's absolutely ridiculous.

SimCity fans, how much do you love timer-based resource-production as the primary means for growing your city? Let's say that you zone some plots of land for houses. In most SimCity games, you tweak the tax code, improve the roads, maybe build a police station nearby and, bit by bit, those homes improve. In SimCity Buildit? You can do some of that, but the main way you improve the residential areas you've zoned is by dragging resources to them.

"They call you a 'Mayor' but a mayor doesn't have to work in the factories and ask for more stock every 2-5 minutes, and have to collect it personally in each factory."

Filed Under: annoyance, annoyances, free to play, in app payments, in game payments, micropayments, simcity
Companies: ea

EA 'Embraces' SimCity Players: Releases Useless Modding Tools And Promises Supposedly Impossible 'Offline' Mode

from the maybe-we're-just-not-hated-ENOUGH dept

EA/Maxis is reviving memories of its epicly disastrous release of SimCity back in March with a couple of announcements. The first announcement is EA's awkward attempt to embrace its community like an ex-husband trying to coax a hug out of his estranged wife during supervised child visitation.

Modders, EA wants YOU to start cranking out some compelling content for SimCity. Here's EA's lead-in:

Maxis and Electronic Arts (“EA”) have a long tradition of supporting the creativity of our community. We’re so excited to see the new ground many of you are breaking with SimCity Modding that we wanted to do something that would make it easier for you to continue to create amazing stuff. We’re putting this policy in place to ensure that our guidelines on Modding are clear and that all of our players get to enjoy SimCity their own way while also maintaining the safety and integrity of the SimCity experience. What comes next is up to you, our players. We hope the SimCity Modding community continues to grow and we’re looking forward to seeing what you create.

According to EA's guidelines the community is basically limited to cosmetic changes, such as reskins of buildings.

1. Mods must not jeopardize the integrity of the gameplay or harm the experience of others. Mods that affect the simulation for multiplayer games and multiplayer features, such as leaderboards or trading with other players, are not allowed.

2. Mods must not infringe any copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret or other intellectual property right of any third party and will not include content that is unlawful, tortious, defamatory, obscene, invasive of the privacy of another person, threatening, harassing, abusive, hateful, racist or otherwise objectionable or inappropriate. SimCity has an age rating of ESRB Everyone 10+ and PEGI 7, and similar ratings from other ratings boards around the world. EA requires that Mods not include any material that would not be allowed under these ratings.

3. Mods may not modify any .com, .exe, .dll, .so or other executable files.

The terms and conditions of SimCity EULA and EA’s Terms of Service are specifically incorporated into this policy by this reference. In the event that the terms of this policy are in conflict with the terms of the SimCity EULA or EA’s Terms of Service, the terms of this Policy shall supersede and govern over any such conflicting terms.

To maintain the integrity of SimCity and ensure the best possible gaming experience for our players, EA reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to revoke permission to use, distribute or make Mods at any time, to disable any Mod within SimCity and to take disciplinary action against players who harm the experience of others.

Distribution of your Mod in any form constitutes a grant by you to EA of an irrevocable, perpetual, royalty-free, sub-licensable right to use, copy, modify and distribute that Mod (and derivatives of that Mod), and use your name if we choose to, for any purpose and through any means, and without obligation to pay you anything, obtain your approval, or give you credit. You also agree to promptly execute assignments confirming this license upon request from EA.

Let's get right to it.

SIMCITY OFFLINE IS COMING!

I';ve wanted to say those words for quite some time, so my apologies that I didn't take the time to say Happy New Year first.

Yes, Offline is coming as a free download with Update 10 to all SimCity players. When we launch it, all of your previously downloaded content will be available to you anytime, anywhere, without the need for an internet connection. We are in the late phases of wrapping up its development and while we want to get it into your hands as soon as possible, our priority is to make sure that it’s as polished as possible before we release it.

In fact, it actually improves the game in some ways. City populations are actually tracked correctly and you can edit outside of your city boundaries. Those additional edits are also saved when you reconnect.

[B]ecause your saved games in this mode are stored locally, you can save and load to your heart’s content. Our team will be delivering a follow-up blog that will outline the full details in the near future so stay tuned.

Bringing the game Offline means big things for our wonderful community of Modders. They can now make modifications to the game and its components without compromising the integrity of the Online game.

Mods must not jeopardize the integrity of the gameplay or harm the experience of others.

Mods may not modify any .com, .exe, .dll, .so or other executable files.

Filed Under: drm, limits, modders, modding, offline mode, restrictions, simcity
Companies: ea

Education Through Games, Or How SimCity Finally Became Useful

from the sim-school dept

Someone once told me that when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade. I personally always wondered whether you should then expect life to give you vodka to put into said lemonade, but that's besides the point. We all know that the SimCity roll out was an unmitigated disaster the likes of which had never been seen (if gaming blogs were your reference point, anyway). Fortunately, we have some very talented lemonade-makers in this country that are turning the game into a useful teaching tool for children.

Glasslab Games has worked with EA to make a modded version of the commercial game, called SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge. While the primary use of the mod is to teach children about the dangers and solutions to citizens making everything smell like battery acid, a wonderful secondary use is to track how children apply what they've learned to problem-solving. The game also teaches logic-application beyond the pollution problem.

One neat change that's been made is the addition of a number of 10-minute challenges to the game. An example given in this Fast Company report is "Can you use fewer bus stops to get all the kids to school?", and at the conclusion of each everyone gets feedback on what they did right and what they did wrong.

Filed Under: education, pollution, simcity
Companies: ea

Two Bad Launches: Why Rockstar Is Succeeding Where EA Failed

from the post-mortem dept

There will be the typical growing pains for an online game, including but not limited to crashes, glitches, crazy bugs, gameplay modes and mechanics that need re-balancing and other surprises! Even in GTAV Story Mode, some of you may have seen a few odd and even amusing little glitches out there last week. This sort of thing is inevitable in a massive open-world game and there’ll surely be lots more unexpected oddities like this in the Online world next week – rest assured we’ll be monitoring and actively doing all we can to smooth such things out as they happen, but we need your help to find them, as well as your feedback to help fine tune all of the game's systems so everything is perfectly balanced.

For the time being and until we have been able to get everybody access to GTA Online and things are running smoothly, we have disabled the option of purchasable GTA$ cash packs. Players can however keep on earning GTA$ by pulling off Jobs and other profitable gameplay activities rather than purchasing cash packs.

Filed Under: growing pains, gta 5, launches, simcity, video games
Companies: ea, rockstar

EA Hates You: SimCity Kneecaps The Modding Community

from the control-hungry dept

Hey, remember SimCity? You know, the game in which its creators botched the release so badly that it essentially became the how-to manual on how not to release a game? The game that the series creator came out against, calling the actions of the publishing company "inexcusable." The game that so pissed off its biggest fans with the online-requirement DRM, locked down platform, and anti-consumer behavior that they once again were voted as the worst company in America? You'd have thought they'd have learned their lesson at this point.

But you'd be wrong. See, SimCity is a PC game, and if PC games have any great advantage over their console competition, it's the ease with which gamers can mod the originals and make them better, more interesting, and even drive sales of the original product. Unless that game is SimCity, that is. Why? Because apparently EA hates you.

The good news is that SimCity will soon be allowing user-generated content. The bad news is that EA is looking to place so many restrictions on what you can actually mod that it seems almost pointless. In reaching out to the game's community with its initial plans, EA has already put its foot down on mods that change the way the game plays. Here are the two key points from its "first draft":

-UGC that effects the simulation for multiplay games and features are not allowed.P
-Examples of acceptable UGC include swapping art assets, like buildings and vehicles.

Filed Under: modding, simcity
Companies: ea

Will Wright Says SimCity Launch Was 'Inexcusable'

from the from-god's-lips dept

While we recently discussed how EA's silence has managed to push the backlash over the SimCity launch debacle into the background, anyone at all familiar with the story realizes what a complete botch it was. The initial backlash was bad enough, but it was made all the worse when company executive after company executive came out of the woodwork to excuse, obscure, and otherwise make misleading comments about the more egregious aspects of the launch failure. The most frustrating of these was the insistence that the online requirement for the game was in no way a form of DRM, it was a simply a matter of vision in core gameplay, and anyone confusing the two doesn't understand the gaming software business.

You know who does know a great deal about that business, however? The creator of the Sim City franchise, and legend, Will Wright. And when asked to comment about the latest iteration of the franchise, which he didn't have a hand in, he spoke quite plainly.

"I feel bad for the team", he says. "I could have predicted - I kind of did predict there'd be a big backlash about the DRM stuff."

"That was basically inexcusable, that you charge somebody $60 for a game and they can't play it. I can understand the outrage. If I was a consumer buying the game and that happened to me, I'd feel the same."

Filed Under: drm, simcity, will wright
Companies: ea

EA COO: We Get Votes For 'Worst Company' Because We're Awesome And Voters Are Homophobes

from the uh-oh dept

Following the SimCity launch debacle and recent ridiculous comments made by EA's Label President, it's beginning to look like we're seeing some kind of inter-company contest amongst EA executives over who can step in it the most. The company is somewhat recently infamous for being voted "The Worst Company In America" in a poll by The Consumerist and, congratulations, they have made the final match-up in that same poll again this year (voting ends tonight). I can certainly understand that executives for the company aren't too pleased about this chance at repeating the "award", but certainly cannot understand why their COO would come out with one of the most obfuscating attempts to create a sympathetic narrative ever devised.

Yet, that's exactly what Peter Moore did on EA's site, in a rambling half-pushback semi-admission on the company's missteps that ultimately concludes that EA is super-freaky-awesome and homophobes are generating The Consumerist's poll results. Seriously, just look at how he begins.

The tallest trees catch the most wind.

That’s an expression I frequently use when asked to defend EA’s place in the gaming industry. And it comes to mind again this week as we get deeper into the brackets of an annual Web poll to name the “Worst Company in America.”

Some of these complaints are 100 percent legitimate – like all large companies we are not perfect. But others just don’t hold water:

In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America. That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we're not caving on that.

Instead, it looks at EA’s history of buying up smaller, successful developers with the intention of milking — and arguably ruining — the intellectual properties that made these acquired companies so attractive. It also discusses EA’s exclusivity deals on popular sports games, that some say effectively sets the bar for retail prices for the rest of the gaming industry.

Then there’s the issue of microtransactions, in-game purchases that EA has made no secret are at the center of its business model. Many customers believe that EA’s view of microtransactions isn’t to simply charge customers a little bit of money for something that is additional, but not integral, to the core game, but rather to put out broken or deliberately incomplete games with the ultimate goal of selling add-on content that should have been included in the $60 price tag to begin with.

Filed Under: criticism, drm, peter moore, simcity, worst company in america
Companies: ea

EA Labels President: DRM Is A Failed Strategy, But SimCity Didn't Have Any DRM

from the wait,-what? dept

I must admit that there are times when I become very concerned about whether or not I can actually read. Or, more concerning yet, whether I have the proper capacity to imbibe reality at all. This, friends, is surely one of those times. Barely a week removed from Super Meat Boy developer Tommy Refenes alerting Electronic Arts to the fact that their own DRM hurts their bottom line more than any amount of piracy, still in the midst of what some might call the wind-down curve of the SimCity fiasco, and with examples like Spore and their single-use codes still in my mind, I find a statement made by EA Labels President Frank Gibeau that seeks to unmake all of those thoughts.

At a developers conference, Gibeau revealed his belief that DRM is a completely useless tool for game developers. Then, to make sure that my brain was as confused as possible, he made sure I knew that SimCity didn't have any DRM component to it.

"DRM is a failed dead-end strategy; it's not a viable strategy for the gaming business. So what we tried to do creatively is build an online service in the SimCity universe and that's what we sought to achieve."

"I was involved in all the meetings. DRM was never even brought up once," Gibeau told GI.biz. "You don't build an MMO because you're thinking of DRM—you're building a massively multiplayer experience, that's what you're building. 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."

Filed Under: drm, frank gibeau, simcity, strategy
Companies: ea

Super Meat Boy Developer To EA: DRM Hurts Your Bottom Line More Than Piracy Does

from the EA-is-so-hardcore-it-only-plays-PR-in-'Nightmare-Mode' dept

The wheels have now come completely off EA's DRMobile, thanks to its botched SimCity launch that was marred by server issues, long lines at the refund counter and some amazingly bad coding, all held together by Maxis GM Lucy Bradshaw's irrepressible bullshit-spinning. The backlash has been enormous and EA is likely wishing it was back in the good old days when Spore (remember that backlash?) was nothing more than harmless vaporware.

It's safe to say that EA has almost single-handedly run the good highly-tarnished name of DRM and internet-only requirements into the ground, finishing the job Diablo 3 began last year. Many gamers have pointed out the futility of these anti-piracy (and anti-cheating/hacking) efforts as well as unleashed their fury at being handed a worthless, broken-on-purpose product in exchange for their money.

And it's not just angry customers making noise. Super Meat Boy developer Tommy Refenes has weighed in with his thoughts on EA's open hostility towards its paying customers. (It's a truly excellent post, and I would encourage you to click through and read the entire article.)

The first problem he sees with EA's actions is its insistence on using intangible losses from piracy to shape its software development.

I think I can safely say that Super Meat Boy has been pirated at least 200,000 times. We are closing in on 2 million sales and assuming a 10% piracy to sales ratio does not seem unreasonable. As a forward thinking developer who exists in the present, I realize and accept that a pirated copy of a digital game does not equate to money being taken out of my pocket. Team Meat shows no loss in our year end totals due to piracy and neither should any other developer.

Loss due to piracy is an implied loss because it is not a calculable loss. You cannot, with any accuracy, state that because your game was pirated 300 times you lost 300 sales. You cannot prove even one lost sale because there is no evidence to state that any one person who pirated your game would have bought your game if piracy did not exist. From an accounting perspective it’s speculative and a company cannot accurately determine loss or gain based on speculative accounting.

After the frustrations with SimCity I asked Origin for a refund and received one. This was money they had and then lost a few days later. Applying our earlier conversation about calculable loss, there is a loss that is quantifiable, that will show up in accounting spreadsheets and does take away from profit. That loss is the return, and it is much more dangerous than someone stealing your game...

In the retail world, you could potentially put a return back on the shelf, you could find another customer that wants it, sell it to them and there would be virtually no loss. In the digital world, because there is no set amount of goods, you gain nothing back (one plus infinity is still infinity). It’s only a negative experience. A negative frustrating experience for a customer should be considered more damaging than a torrent of your game.

I challenge a developer to show evidence that accurately shows implementation of DRM is a return on investment and that losses due to piracy can be calculated. I do not believe this is possible.

I do believe people are less likely to pirate your software if the software is easy to buy, easy to run, and does what is advertised.

People have to WANT to buy your software, people have to WANT to support you. People need to care about your employees and your company’s well being. There is no better way to achieve that than making sure what you put out there is the best you can do and you treat your customers with respect.

Filed Under: copyright, drm, piracy, simcity, super meat boy, tommy refenes
Companies: ea