Unread postby doc.exe » March 9th, 2013, 12:03 pm
Well, most games with an always online component tend to present problems at launch. That part is not surprising. What astonishes me is the magnitude of the issues in this case and the fact that EA just seems incapable of so much as sneezing without causing another PR blunder.
I think the game will be fine once most of the issues are resolved, but in the meantime things will be very rough. That’s particularly sad in the case of Maxis, from what I have seen of the game, it seems they really put a lot of effort into crafting a great product.
I remember a management seminar I once took were the professor explained that, sometimes in order to get rid of “undesirable people” who could damage the business, companies end up taking actions that directly inconvenience the customers and if they take things too far, they might actually end causing more harm to their business than whatever thing the “undesirables” might have done. That’s more or less the issue with always online DRM. All the problems with games like SimCity would have been averted if they have got rid of the always online DRM component. I understand piracy in PC is ridiculously rampant, but honestly I don’t think inconveniencing customers who did pay legally for the game is the solution. Many companies have tried it already and it never works as expected.
Of course, as long as people blindly go and keep buying things with this kind of elements in them, companies like EA would never see a reason to change their business practices, given that they only care about the money. But I want to believe there is a limit as to how much abuse customers can take and how much negative publicity a company can receive before the business collapses.
Now, I honestly don’t hate EA (at this point in my life, I think is really dumb to hate a videogame company, any videogame company), but I hope the backlash they have received from this incident (including Amazon pulling the game from sale) makes them reflect about their approach and change some of their practices.
Edit: Reading a bit more about the issue is not only a matter of DRM as I thought, but of the game design. Many tasks are apparently directly handled by the server. This mean someone didn’t calculate properly the capacity they required or they decided to be cheap about it. In any case, this is a major screw up for EA and Maxis.
"No te tomes la vida demasiado en serio, al fin y al cabo no saldrás vivo de ella." Les Luthiers
"There are two essential rules to management. One, the customer is always right; and two, they must be punished for their arrogance." Dogbert