Update 10 will add a single player mode for playing offline. Mods are a go too.
SimCity Finally Getting Offline Mode and Modding : Read more
SimCity Finally Getting Offline Mode and Modding : Read more
At least the AH is going away, but yeah, LAN and offline single player would be nice, too!Now if only Blizzard were to follow suit with Diablo 3...
Might be some truth to it, though I like to believe there is lots of people like myself out there... People that wait for the launch to see if/how the game works at launch, particularly with "always on" requirements, to know whether to buy the game full price or to wait for a 2$ offer sometime in the future.EA's "incident" with "spore" should be enough of a lesson to ditch such a game, and that people would rather pirate than to buy crap. I don't believe that this is a "win/win," I believe that this is a "loss/loss".When someone release a product where they say that the reason the product doesn't work is because they had to make it like that to prevent piracy, that's when I loose all faith in the product. They have Origin for that (or Steam), SimCity and the server version (both the game and the server) is easily found on piratebay and other sites. Someone will always pirate, and someone will always make the game work independent of "always on" and SECUROM/alike. Doesn't mean they will sell a extra copy if no one pirated, mabye a few, but weighing losses in their brand(s) and wins in extra sales will probably show that they are out of business before all the pirates are gone anyway.The requirement of online servers and all the bugs at launch is why I haven't touched the game yet, though now being a year old, I don't even see the value of getting the game for 10-20$ on a sale...What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that this was likely their intention all along. As bad as the launch for this and D3 were they were hugely successful games, partially due to the following the brands have but also in a big way due to the fact that early on the only way to play it was to buy it.This drop in piracy and those that "needed" to play it had to buy it instead of simply heading over to the nearest torrent site made them both hugely successful despite protestations from a lot in the gamer community.Now they get to release an offline/single player mode and get a few more sales from the few hold outs that were genuinely going to buy if/when a offline mode was implemented. The upside to all this is when they want to turn the servers off (they made most of the money off this game already) they can do without too much backlash.Its win win win for all involved, buyers get their offline mode, pirates get their free copy without convoluted cracks/emu servers and EA get to turn off the online servers when they want (i.e. when it is no longer cost effective to run them).
Excactly! If you want a game to fail, release it unfinished, with always-on req and just wait for critiques. If one person says it's a bad game, that's worth 5-10 customers, if a community says it's a bad game, go figure! EA have survived spore as well as MW. Without an internet connection, MW would represent a very, very limited internet experience, atleast from what I experienced with MW2...When I was persuaded to buy MW2, it sounded like the best of all games, though I soon realized that the game was one of the most limited I'd played on steam for a very long while. Yes, I played MW2 online, but it never delivered on it's promise. And it definately failed on it's single-player module. No more MW2, and no more EA.I guess if a company wants to destroy a franchise, this is how to do it. Gamer's can always find an alternative and bad press like what SimCity and D3 had push people to find alternatives. Making games like Path of Exile and Anno become blockbusters overnight.If you really want to feed the competition, keep it up.
A more stable game would get far more customers, the rest I don't know. My reasoning atleast would be that they pushed away a customer (me, if it'd been a good game at launch) because the game was so flawed for those that have bought it, which would probably mean that they (and therefore the people that bought it later) would have to firstly wait for fixes for their problems, then wait a year or two for the promised extra content if any. Extra content is here now it seems (offline mode and such), but the expected playability/standard gameplay is nowhere to be seen. Sure someone might be playing it right now without issues at all, but what EA should know is the basic anyone studying economy would tell them; brand is one factor, the way the product is reviewed at launch is another. I'd wish a EA representative would read this thread and "fix" future titles reading OUR reasoning of what's wrong and what they would need to do to sell their product, but I'm pretty sure they never read the article about the SimCity launch about a year ago, otherwise this article would never exist...The "idea" they had for the game was actually pretty cool, having a global economy generated by other players. What they lacked though was the proper execution of it. I think if there was more interactivity, bigger plots, and, overall, a more stable game, it would have been very successful.