2001

This has always been one of those weird arguments. I know I’m just a small drop in the bucket, but I would have bought the game if it wasn’t for the whole server fiasco when it came out. I remember Greenmangaming having a deal on it, but I ended up not buying it because it was just when it came out and the issues started getting publicity. Then, my interest waned (even though I love my city building games), until now when they are finally releasing an offline version of the game. Will I pay full price now? No, because it’s an older game and I know it still has issues. If they released the game right out of the gate without these ‘anti-piracy online mode only’ hijinks, I would have thrown my money at them. Again, I’m a small drop in the bucket, but I can’t be alone in those thoughts.

I always think that pirates will always pirate a game. Preventing a pirate from pirating your game isn’t a ‘win’ situation. They will move onto other games to download and you’re just causing grief for your paying customers. (yah, I know, common argument, dead horse, etc etc).

I suppose, they do have a chance again at getting my money now that they are putting an offline mode in and any money is good money.

2002

I always think that pirates will always pirate a game.

But no one was able to pirate SC5. Say what you will about their DRM strategy – you could not pirate a working copy of the game. Even the guy who removed the online requirement wasn’t able to replicate the full game. At least two months after release, which is when I stopped looking for a pirated copy, nothing was available. That’s extremely unusual in the PC space and may be the reason the game was so profitable.

2003

Well, if it’s offline and they’re finally admitting that their server is in no way necessary to any of the features of the game (whoa! REALLY?), then the modding debate is pointless. Them saying “Please don’t modify DLLs of our game or else we’ll banz j00” doesn’t really hold a lot of water if I’m no longer connecting to their server to play the game and risking whatever the Origin equivalent of a VAC ban is by doing so.

The mods will come, and it is possible that someday people will be able to make the core components of SC5 work. I mean, they’ve got their work cut out for them. Intra-city play: broken, horribly. Base simulation logic (e.g., number of reported SIM residents doesn’t in any way relate to number of simulated residents): broken, by design. Behavioral patterns in the Glassbox engine (e.g., home-seeking and job-seeking algorithms): broken, bizarrely. City size: crippled, cruelly.

But then again, people turned SC4 from an imperfect, at-times shaky release into one of the greatest sims of all time (I do believe SC4 gets a bit of unfair rosy-tinted glasses effect since pre-expansion and pre-modding, there were many issues present). So, more power to 'em.

But yes, it is hilarious to see how pitiful their lies and deceptions were, much like it was when Blizzard’s assertions regarding online-only were proven false by the console release. If a game company at least had the honesty to say “We inherently crippled our game and placed it at the mercy of our unreliable server network, thereby massively inconveniencing paying customers, in order to keep pirates from easily cracking the game because we value profit over player enjoyment,” I’d at least respect them while not buying their product ;). I mean, as JBG kept saying at some point, it’s their right to make money as a corporation, or whatever. I’d just appreciate a bit of transparency as opposed to the “Oh but no see it’s all essential to fun to connect to a server to play your single player game! You get ACHIEVEMENTS!!!”

2004

You and I are two kindred drops then. I was almost swept up in the giddy hype that was bubbling around the initial release, because… well hell, it was the first SimCity game in a decade, and I am one of those gamers mentioned upthread with too little time but enough money to waste. Cautionary voices from podcasts made me hesitate to buy it at release. After release, the outright howls of anguish made me back away. And of course now the complaints from respected voices in this thread about too-tiny cities and the silly “region” thing have turned me off entirely.

As an aside, I will say (a little shamefacedly) that if the game had been offered on Steam I probably would have pre-ordered and been among the howling voices on launch month.

It probably did deny the pirate community the ability to put the game up on “warz” sites (is that still a word?), and likely made EA some money in the first few weeks that would would have lost out on otherwise.

The counter-question is how much money (like the $120 from me and Biosc1) did they lose from the mess that their anti-piracy approach created, and does that loss offset the “DRM dividend?” And how much will the lost goodwill cost them in the future? We’ll never know of course, but speaking for myself, I’ll be looking at EA-published games with a jaundiced eye for a couple years due to their blunders in 2013.

2005

That’s irrelevant unless it corresponded to an increase in sales. Did SC5 outsell the previous one by a statistically significant margin? Genuinely wanting to know.

2006

I entirely agree with this post. I too did not purchase SC5 entirely due to the always online component and have stayed away since due to the other issues. I did not even purchase it for $15 with my Amazon credit last week whereas had the game not been always online EA would have received my $60 on Day One.

2007

I think warez is the term you are looking for. You’ve been playing too many Zombie games lately.

2008

The counter-question is how much money (like the $120 from me and Biosc1) did they lose from the mess that their anti-piracy approach created, and does that loss offset the “DRM dividend?” And how much will the lost goodwill cost them in the future? We’ll never know of course, but speaking for myself, I’ll be looking at EA-published games with a jaundiced eye for a couple years due to their blunders in 2013.

That’s irrelevant unless it corresponded to an increase in sales. Did SC5 outsell the previous one by a statistically significant margin? Genuinely wanting to know.

I’m not sure about the comparison to SC4 (or how useful it would be, given the vastly different market conditions), but Simcity 5 sold extremely well – more than 2 million copies in the first few months, for a PC-only $60 game, is outstanding. (http://www.gamespot.com/articles/simcity-sales-hit-2-million/1100-6411970/)

There are very complicated questions about what the numbers would have been without DRM, and it seems EA is now moving towards offline-only DRM for some titles in the future. But I think we can be confident EA very carefully studied this, and more importantly, that they have every reason and right to be extremely protective of their software. Remember what happened with Crysis (back when it was a good PC exclusive) and piracy? EA would gladly trade some “goodwill,” whatever exactly that means, if the disaster that was Crysis piracy never repeated. As much as everyone here dumps on EA, and pretends customers can do no wrong, what gamers did with Crysis was utterly inexcusable.

2009

Has there EVER been a game where an active mod scene hurt rather than helped sales? I cannot think of a single one, and evidence of the opposite point is certainly in generous supply (Half-Life, Elder Scrolls games, Civ 4, Warcraft, Arma 2, KSP, Minecraft, Sims and SimCity 4, Freespace, Baldur’s Gate, etc). I do not understand how a company thinks that killing the modding community will hurt them. Even if people pirate the game, guess what, people are going to pirate the game anyway, and plenty more people will end up buying the game later to play with the mods legally (especially when the game is going for $5 or $10). It’s such an ass-backward business decision, regardless of any arguments for “gamer-friendliness,” that makes me wonder where EA is going there. I’ve also never heard of modding encouraging piracy – it may cause more people to pirate the game, as it expands the audience in general, but I don’t think it’s going to encourage people to pirate it instead of buy it.

I don’t think anyone thinks the average line developer at EA is evil, or even incompetent, but I do think that the people at the top don’t care whether or not a game is “good.”. Like JBG, their only judgement of value towards a game is whether is makes money or not in the next quarter, which seems to be turning into somewhat of a detriment as they alienate customers with games like PvZ 2 and SimCity 5; the botched rollout of Battlefield 4 doesn’t really help them either. Saying that “well, they are a big company, they are just trying to make more money like big companies do” is ignoring the fact that there are plenty of other big game companies that seem to manage to not shoot themselves in the foot with these kinds of problems every few months. Judging by their earnings over the last year, I don’t know that that philosophy is really working out for them.

Honestly, I really hope they turn things around; EA has control of some of my favorite game franchises – Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Star Wars, SimCity – and a lot of their upcoming games look interesting at least, like Titanfall. However, after the way things have gone for them lately, and the fact that their sequels to beloved franchises don’t seem to fare too well as of late, I’m not exactly rushing out to buy their games on the first day (and I pretty much try to have as little to do with Origin as possible, so that isn’t helping things). But if the entire company were to explode next week, taking all their IP with them, I do not think I would be particularly upset to see it go. I’d rather see the talent there go somewhere else that will give them a better business environment in which to produce games.

And JBG, you’d have fewer people posting about you being some sort of corporate shill if you had posted on more than two threads, where your only contribution seems to be…defending the right of giant corporations to indulge in self-destructive, anti-community behavior.

2010

With respect, the whole point of laws and rules is to apply them fairly. Simply because a corporation takes advantage of a rule, does not make that rule bad, nor does it make people defending that corporation “shills.” It is incredibly discouraging to see you defending what is obviously a personal attack, but it is not surprising – as was mentioned earlier, corporations are, for a variety of reasons, easy punching bags for people, even when they are invoking rights afforded to every content creator. If you disagree with any of my statements of the law in the copyright thread, I’d love to hear what they are and why (with citations to applicable laws). It sure sounds like you don’t have any substantive disagreements, and just want to continue yelling “shill” as though it means something.

As for piracy, we already established SC5 wasn’t pirated, largely because of its DRM. I’m not sure why you are drawing a link between modding and piracy, because I didn’t. The connection I drew was between modding and lost sales of expansions and DLC.

As for mods specifically, I think you have probably noticed that companies are moving towards freemium-style economies with ample DLC (even Forza did this), in part because they have recognized that they have lost profits by allowing mods and free user creations for so long. The appropriate analysis is not whether mods have actively cost sales of existing products, but whether they have undercut the need for freemium or expansion markets. While it is true that some companies have encouraged mods, for either creative or strategic reasons, it seems clear why many big ones are backing off that stance in 2014.

2011

Her link between the two was the original point: their draconian DRM scheme seems to be the genesis of their modding ban. Isis’ point was that not only has their DRM potentially driven away more sales than it saved them, it is forcing EA to wash their hands of the longevity and long-tail sales that a healthy modding community generates.

I’d cite that question in another way: Will your in-house “freemium” development teams generate more revenue than the long-tail sales from a good modding community would?

I don’t think that the development shops have “recognized” one way or the other as superior. For every big developer that has decided to cut modding out of the picture you can point to a Valve or a Bethesda that dove headlong into supporting user-generated content as a way of extending the life (and sales) of their products.

2012

One of the issues is that developing in-house DLC costs money. How much do you make off it versus how much does freely created mods add to the value of your product?

2013

Yeah, the other thing is that allowing mods for a game doesn’t automatically mean you can’t have official DLC. Skyrim offers almost unlimited mods, and Bethesda sells DLC. Hell, some of the mods directly compete with some of the DLC. For example, there’s a Workshop file that allows you to build houses and furniture in Skyrim and it came out long before the Hearthfire DLC.

2014

Nowhere did I say that EA was not within its rights to have these kinds of ridiculous restrictions. If they want to cut off their nose to spite their face, that’s fine with me. I said it seemed like a horrible business decision, not anything illegal. If I was an EA shareholder right now, I would be getting pretty frustrated with this kind of idiocy while they continue to lose money from flubbed launches and anti-consumer policies. As I said, the bar for me to buy an EA game these days is rather high in large part because of this kind of crap, and the fact that Origin is Bizarro Steam.

Tin Wisdom cleared up my point nicely. I don’t think that your connection really works either. As Telefrog said, did Skyrim mods really hurt the sales of Skyrim DLC? How about Crusader Kings II? Something tells me that’s extraordinarily unlikely. The only kind of DLC which is likely to be hurt is DLC that is little more than palate swaps or something else that can be easily duplicated, which, yes, if you’re EA and want to charge five bucks so that I can add a new building that’s really nothing more than an imbedded ad, I suppose you might have trouble competing with people making free content. On the other hand, if you want to kill the long tail of selling your game for years instead of months in order to try and get people to buy your overpriced DLC, you’re well within your rights. I just think you’re making a stupid, short-sighted decision.

Tin Wisdom did a fine job refuting this supposition as well. I don’t know which “big ones” are backing off the modding support aside from EA; certainly Bethesda, Valve, and Paradox at least are not buying the idea that crushing mod support will make them more money in the long run. Tin Wisdom and biosc1 point out another problem with this line of thinking – if you spend 10 million dollars developing DLC for a game that you’ve crushed mod support for, and sell 15 million dollars worth of DLC…was that a better decision than just selling 10 million dollars more of the base game by supporting the mod community?

And I’m not calling you a shill because your defending a corporation. I’m calling you a shill because that’s literally the only thing you’ve done on Qt3 since you joined three months ago. I don’t think it’s out of line for people to suspect you have some ulterior motive here, whether you have a financial interest in pushing this line somehow or if you’re just doing it to troll in threads where you play a ridiculous devil’s advocate.

2015

Dude, nothing and no one in the copyright thread was a shill, for the fifth time. I stated very obvious legal principles, for the benefit of people here who do not have legal training but nonetheless felt compelled to argue about legal issues. (You saw that again in this thread, by the way, when multiple people compared distributing mods to painting a car, which is wrong for about five reasons, but who’s counting, people who know the law are shills!!). You still have not refuted anything I said in that thread, so your entire ridiculous “shill” line of argument really needs to put up or shut up at this point.

Tin Wisdom did a fine job refuting this supposition as well. I don’t know which “big ones” are backing off the modding support aside from EA; certainly Bethesda, Valve, and Paradox at least are not buying the idea that crushing mod support will make them more money in the long run

That’s their decision, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Note that Paradox is an infinitely smaller company than EA (by a ridiculous order of magnitude). They may benefit more from mods and the word of mouth they create, than a larger publisher like EA, which has the ad dollars to make up for it. The comparison isn’t that helpful.

As Telefrog said, did Skyrim mods really hurt the sales of Skyrim DLC? How about Crusader Kings II? Something tells me that’s extraordinarily unlikely.

It might have. I’m not sure. I think it’s a market-specific, game-specific analysis, and it’s not always a clear choice. Picking two examples of companies that have reached different conclusions in no way refutes my point that many major publishers, including EA and Ubisoft, are moving in the opposite direction, and that it’s not self-evident that mods are always revenue-enhancing for the content creator.

2016

My disagreement with you isn’t whether what these companies are doing is legal or not, it’s that is bad business and anti-consumer. No one in this thread has said EA is doing something illegal. They are just being stupid.

And I would buy that mods are not always revenue-enhancing for the content creator if I could think of even one example where it hasn’t worked out to the benefit of the publisher. The fact that EA and whoever else are trying to kill modding and add insane DRM to keep people from pirating their titles (which ends up not working in the end in 99% of the cases) does not mean that they are making a good decision to do so, especially when there are high profile examples of the exact opposite (Arma 2, for instance, which sold like gangbusters purely because of Day Z, even years after its release). Especially when these companies are the same people who talk about losing billions of dollars to piracy due to “lost sales,” most of which is complete bullshit.

2017

Yet even that is arguable. Why should you know better than EA? who is arguably better businessmen than all of us here. Who’s to say that EA don’t have reams of data to support the claims that SimCity mods don’t support more sales?

From what I have seen, the argument that mods is good for business is just based on anecdotal data and “feelings” without hard numbers to back them up. It’s an argument from hurt, entitled gamers and not an argument from a business perspective.

2018

This argument about mods, especially by the people who are arguing for them, reminds me of this old chestnut of a joke:

Man: The food in this restaurant is terrible!
Woman: And such small portions!

Just to spell it out for you: the people who are arguing that EA should allow mods for Sim City are the very same ones who vehemently hate the game. As if they would even bother with the mods anyway.

For some people this is all just an argument about principle. How dare EA make the game online only! How dare EA not allow mods! They don’t actually want to play Sim City, they just want EA to know that they hate their decisions. Thus the ridiculous “Worst Company in America” thing.

2019

Why is that an unreasonable proposition? Many a mod has “fixed” a game for me so that something that was previously meh became a very enjoyable experience. A good example is the XMax mod for Titan Quest. Various Paradox games have also have mods that are the sole reason people have continued to purchase DLC for a game. Victoria 2 has some big Pop mods, EU has Magna Mundi. I personally know a few people who bought Crusader Kings 2 solely for the Game of Thrones mod.

Another huge example of people playing a game because of a mod is DayZ for ARMA2.

2020

Some of you are missing the other 2 major reason for going server-side. It exactly matches the timeline Madden moved into this whole “on-line matches” dealio.

#1 - Getting friends to try and get other friends to play the game. This was influenced by the Facebook model. That kind of nudging does not exist when you’ve buried yourself deep in your own sim.
#2 - Money. For the last several years EA has been moving resources on-line as much as possible so they can say “look at how many people are playing” when trying to get sponsors like Nissan, Toyota, Progressive Insurance, Snickers, etc. That is potential big money and basically “free” at the expense of the player. When you consider all over-the-air network tv, Nascar, Football etc etc is all based on commercial sponsorship I’m sure EA has said, “what if we could do the same thing with our games?” NPD results aren’t persuasive to advertisers. # of players on-line is.