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Comment by antifa | Hacker News Reader

> When SimCity launched on March 6, it required players to maintain an active online connection to the game's servers. If that connection dropped, they'd be booted from the game.

SimCity, at it's core, is an offline single player game. EA really fucked this one up.

Also EA already had the reputation of ruining every franchise they bought.

The series lives on through Theotown and City Skylines.

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EA really did screw up a lot of franchises around that time period. I was just watching some retrospectives about Dead Space, and the pattern plays out time and time again with pretty much ever big series they bought.

It seems like EA's MO in the early 2010s was to buy the rights to a successful game, strip the stuff that makes it unique, add some more cover shooting, multiplayer, and boobs, spend $100mil on advertising, then close the studio when they didn't get a return.

Yea I think the article understates this. From my recollection players were not swayed by the multiplayer arguments and saw it for the DRM that it was.

It didn't help at all that 100% of the online servers were in AWS Ireland, regardless of where you were playing from.

That is my exact recollection from the time. I know I stayed away due to that, even prior to the nightmare launch.

This is exactly the problem. The shift to online always, and "free to play" casino-style micro-transaction hell-holes is still a garbage experience. And this is multiplied when you have kids, and you want to just buy them a good game.

Thankfully, a lot of other studios have rejected this. Even though Cities: Skylines has its long list of paid DLC (some great, some meh), at least you don't have to buy them, or have internet to build a city by yourself.

Lastly, and this is anecdotal but, if you make a good game, and respect me as a player, I am more than happy to shell over money for it. I'll pay for quality. Penalize me, nag me, treat me like a child or a criminal, and my money is going to a competitor who doesn't. (I've always felt it was absurdly insulting to plaster anti-piracy rubbish on DVD's...that someone just paid money for. It's the same with games.) Forcing paying customers to suffer because some people steal things, is a losing strategy.

> EA already had the reputation of ruining every franchise they bought.

C&C, WingCommander, Bullfrog, le sigh…

Nightmare prompt: “What if EA acquired Wube (Factorio)?”

It's a good rule of thumb that if EA buys something, that thing is effectively dead.

Sigh indeed... I would pay a ridiculous amount for a Red Alert 2 remaster.

Maybe you’ll like this one

https://youtu.be/Na6bvEEPCQ0

Whoa, looks promising. Great soundtrack already!

I'm waiting for the RA2 for OpenRA to be finished.

>Nightmare prompt: “What if EA acquired Wube (Factorio)?”

Factorio 2 would come out this decade.

It would also be a live service shooter.

Only 99 alien artifacts to unlock blue belts

7 green science for 2 alien artifacts

5€ for 120 green science

just speculation but I think ...

it would kill the series for most but some happy whales and have docents of micro transactions and would be celebrated as huge success by EA management and biggest failure ever by everyone else

I wonder if they had let people host their own servers the game would have flourished better. Require an authentication from the central server once when you start the game to appease the DRM cultists if you must, then let players themselves provide server hardware if they can and want to. With central servers there is just no way for discrete communities to really form, since everyone is funneled into the same pot, and that is against the game's core design.

Some single player games in the same broad genre as Sim City have successfully been adapted to multiplayer, so the premise of doing so wasn't poorly conceived. Transport Tycoon to OpenTTD in particular. The problem in this case was they botched the execution (which was no surprise given EA's abysmal reputation, as you mention.)

OpenTTD supports singleplayer, being forced into multiplayer was the problem.

My impression was that the 2013 SimCity was effectively single player if you didn't connect the game to any of your friends, but that it had always-online DRM which they tried to excuse as something other than DRM.

You could certainly play it single-player, but it wasn't good as a single-player game. It sacrificed far too much. It was meant to be a multiplayer game, and it showed.

I remember seeing a review of a guy playing online, upset that EA wouldn't boot a group of trolls that built cities all around his city, and made their cities to be extreme pollution generators, and then they never played again.

Seemly this happened to multiple people, trolls were all too happy to ruin serious players cities by spamming pollution near them.

Yeah, it's certainly a problem and isn't unique to any particular online multiplayer game. It's why I stopped playing online multiplayer games unless it's just with my friends.

There are too many people out there who make it their mission to ruin other people's fun.

Correlation does not imply causation. Requiring an internet connection is correlated with poor game sales, but is not the cause of the poor sales. The actual cause is poor programming. You see, when you require an always-on internet connection to play a game, most programmers would implement that by having an ugly, in-your-face loading screen where the game "connects to the game servers" and "downloads your profile" and then "uploads your profile" and it always takes much longer than it should. That's what people don't like.

I'm sure that's a large irritant, but the complaints I hear about requiring an internet connection are usually around things like not being able to run the game without an internet connection (remember, there are huge numbers of people that don't have an always-on internet connection), being booted from the game should the connection drop (there are even larger numbers of people who don't have a reliable internet connection), and things like that.

I would never buy a game that requires an internet connection (especially always-on) for a whole bunch of reasons, including those. Ugly connection screens or taking an annoying amount of time to connect wouldn't be the deal-breakers for me, though, if the game were good enough.

Remember that the complaints you're hearing are from your own personal bubble, and may not necessarily be representative of the wider population.

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