The latest iteration in the popular SimCity games (called SimCity, go figure), ran into a bit of a snag this past weekend. When I say snag, I mean that the servers for online play found themselves overloaded with players on release, causing many folks to not have the ability to play the game at all. This wouldn't be an issue for people looking to play some form of single-player offline, yet therein lies the problem: the game has to be online all the time.
It is a form of DRM, or Digital Rights Management, used to combat piracy in games. And while it does work, the defeat of pirates is considerably small compared to the hate that arises in fans of the game in question. Diablo III, an action game made by Blizzard, had the same issue on release. The now-infamous "Error 37" told gamers that they couldn't access servers due to a sizable overload That was fixed in the later weeks, but not without a lot of irate fans complaining on the forums.
The SimCity situation is just as bad, if not worse. Not only does the DRM have a chokehold on the game, but it's also known that if you start a game on a different server, you can't migrate any of your cities from another server onto that one. For example, if you have cities on Server 1, but it's showing up as full of players, you can play on Server 2 as it is showing up open. You'll need to start over however, as all the progress you've made on the previous cities won't move to Server 2.
EA (Electronic Arts), the game's publisher, has acknowledged the server issues and is apparently trying to fix them. They've removed a bunch of features such as the traditional "Cheetah" speed, which can make years fly by in the city you are building, and have also disabled leaderboards and achievements in order to speed up the servers. Additionally, a patch and two servers were added with more to come over the weekend. Reports of any of this working, however, don't seem to exist.
Additionally, EA has refused to provide refunds of the game if bought and downloaded digitally through Origin, their online game service. Amazon, who pulled the game from their store however, is giving out refunds. Kudos.
The thing is, all of this wouldn't be necessary if there was an offline mode to begin with.
And maybe not even that. I can understand a company wanting to protect itself against piracy. By downloading illegal copies of a game through torrent sites or other places, money is lost and people might not get paid. I get that. But, instead of having the entire game one big DRM-fest, how about each game give off a quick note to their servers stating that the copy is indeed legitimate, and then let players on their way?
Also, why not just let the game save data onto player's computers? Why hold cities on the servers and force them to jump between each one just so they can make progress? People have computers with large memory storage for a reason, to save games. It doesn't make any sense why the same features you're providing online cannot be provided offline. And yes, the people wanting a refund for this game deserve one. You've sent out what is essentially a broken product. Let them have their money back.
There have been musings that games will soon face an a all-digital distribution future where everything will require an internet connection. If so, then the industry will need to make sure that situations such as this either won't happen, or will allow ways to play games offline. As it stands now, this is a prime example of what not to do.
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