SIMCITY is $40....

[satcharna]

I agree, Sporkafife, and it's very sad. This is why I personally make sure to crack every game I get, even legitimate ones. If the developer/publisher won't trust me, I won't trust them either. It very much depends on where you live, in certain countries, the license for the game would hold in a court, and you are pretty much just cattle they sell things to. Luckily, where I live, those licenses would never hold up in court, and the companies know it. No matter how much they'd like to stop me from using software I bought, I'm still the owner, and as such I'm allowed to do whatever I want with it short of making copies and selling them on. It saddens me that so much of the rest of the world are trapped under corporatism and capitalism.

[SuperWeegee4000]

Still overpriced.

[Rockcoole]

SimCity $40?

I don't think this is $40.

(I know you're talking about SimCity 5 by the way, don't buy it)

[Jones-250]

[Tex_NL]

SimCity $40?

http://theurbangeeks.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/SCscreenshot198-1.gif

I don't think this is $40.

(I know you're talking about SimCity 5 by the way, don't buy it)

Pretty sure some collectors are willing to part with $40 for an undamaged copy of the first Simcity in original box.

[satcharna]

Pretty sure some collectors are willing to part with $40 for an undamaged copy of the first Simcity in original box.

Send me their names, I've got two copies to sell.

[Kilmeister]

I think I have my original CD, but the box and manual are definitely gone.

Surprised I hadn't seen this before. Old I guess, but it just made me lol.

[Randox]

PC is far worse than the consoles for DRM. Consoles have nothing on PC in this field.

Steam might be questionable for the licensing versus buying, but this is something you run into a lot on digital distributors. If you are actually buying the game, that's a gift. If you want to own the games you are buying on Steam, go to the store and buy a disc.

On the DRM side, Steam is fantastic, because it actually works. Once the game is verified, you don't need an internet connection to play your steam games. Their system doesn't bug out, and it doesn't intrude. You never have to know it exists. What you have to watch out for is what the XBOne will be doing, and PS3 already does (I don't think the 360 does it, might be wrong) which is allow the game to add it's own DRM. GTA 4 for example has games for windows live, which is an irredemable and buggy piece of **** that will prevent you from playing your brand new copy of any of the GTA 4 titles until you find an obscure "oh, you have to go download the new version of the GFWL program or your game won't start" on google (seriously, go read the steam discussions on the games. They never updated those versions to have the correct DRM program, and the game is totally unhelpful about telling you what the problem is). Other publishers have their own DRM, like EA and does on Mass Effect 1 and 2 (it's on 3 too, but that's only on Origin).

But Sim City 5 is in a whole other league of DRM, the same as Diablo 3 (just incase you thought you were safe with Blizzard/Activision), which is that you literally can not buy the game. What you get are all the game assets, and a client to interface with their server, and it's their server that runs the game. So single player or multiplayer, you have to be connected to their server, because that's where the game is. They do this because it makes piracy pretty much impossible. There are no DRM measures that can be bypassed to play the game, because there is no game to play. To pirate the game, you would have to reverse engineer the portion that is stored on their servers, or somehow acquire that portion of the game directly and set up your own server.

Now, PC did it first, but the consoles are introducing the possibility as well. The PS4 and XBOne (I think it's both, PS4 for sure) are introducing the ability for 'cloud processing', which is offloading some of the processor work of the game to a big server bank, which allows you to run games on the console that it could never run on it's own. Your offloading some of that extra work to another computer. That's an awesome concept, but it's also the most draconian form of DRM, identical to Diablo 3 and Sim City 5. By making a game that the console can't run, and presumably does not have a complete copy of (it wouldn't have the part of the program the cloud is running), you can't pirate it because you don't have a complete game, so even a PC emulation can't overcome this problem.

This goes above and beyond always online DRM because of bandwidth. It does not take a lot of bandwidth to tell the servers that you are still there and not stealing anything. To run the game itself through the internet means you now have latency in a single player game, and are at the mercy of your internet connection beyond simply is it working. Now it has to be working well, and it has to work well the entire time you are playing, because as soon as it can't cope with the demands of the game, the game lags, or disconnects.

To me, there are two great ways to curb piracy. The first are the online retailers like steam, which make it convenient. It's the same as how being able to buy digital downloads of individual songs curbs music piracy. You make it really convenient, play to instant gratification (or as close to as possible), and more people will pay for it, because you've now made it even easier than piracy.

The other are the more creative DRM techniques, which introduce subtle (sometimes less so, like drunk batman from Arkham Asylum), yet frustrating and game breaking errors when the game is copied. These errors are pretty much impossible to find before the game is copied, so they have to be found and observed, and then their causes found and repaired. When layered up multiple times, so that each fix reveals a new error, it can take months to get a fu;lly functional version going, by which time people are really angry because they keep getting versions of the game that don't work, and they stop trusting that any of them do. Developers can also help out by seeding defective versions disguised as working versions, to increase confusion and frustration that much more.

This is pretty much perfection. You can inflict massive pain on thieves, while having absolutely no impact at all on legitimate users. You can curb piracy by reducing the number of people willing to jump through the hoops, and the longer people stick with it, the more vengeance you exact upon them wasting ever increasing amounts of their time.

Edited June 28, 2013 by Randox

[satcharna]

Actually, you're wrong Randox, much as I agree with most of your post.

The SimCity 5 you get on your harddrive is a complete game, and all the servers do is store your savefiles and run DRM, as well as run parts of the completely bugged to death "multiplayer". Using a small hexeditor, you can run SimCity 5 offline indefinitely with no ill effects, other than the lack of updates about what other players' cities around you are doing.

[Sapphire]

Don't know why when people say that "PC DRM is worse than console DRM", they immediately bring up Steam. Steam's optional. Console DRM isn't. There's other game services out there (like GOG, which has no DRM at all), and even our very own KSP which has no DRM at all.

I picked this video up from someone else in a similar debate. It's really good.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/7586-Why-PC-Gaming-Gets-Away-With-It

Warning! There's harsh language.

Edited June 29, 2013 by Sapphire

[satcharna]

But Steam is DRM, even if I'd say it's not as intrusive as most other DRM. Many games require you to install it, and most of them require you to be running the client while playing the game, and the client wants to check in with Valve's servers every now and then. It lets you play disconnected, but you still need to "activate" the game online, so to speak, and maintain the client installation.

Personally, I like Steam. I can keep in touch with my gaming companions while playing, and it offers several useful features other than that as well, but it is DRM, and many people simply don't like/use it.

[Kerbface]

I wish I didn't have Steam but I had to get it for Skyrim. I don't social game or anything, I just wanted to play my single player game, but of course now I have to run it on Steam everytime. I always get out of Steam once I'm done playing Skyrim.

[joppiesaus]

The first Simcity wat totaly awsome.

This Simcity has got 1 improvement: You can build traffic roundabouts.

And now the dark side:

-Always online

-Takes a good computer to play with.

Not wortht it.

[TouhouTorpedo]

The interesting thing is people saying a lot here "EA ruined SimCity Franchise!" but are forgetting that EA owned the franchise when SimCity 4 was made, which aside from a really scummy sales tactic (release a version with a load of features missing first - Sim City 4, then some expansion packs with features that were certainly supposed to be there originally - leading to the deluxe edition which is frankly the only one you should have, and I have the original like a sucker) it was probably the best Sim City game there had been.