Photo Credit: Kevin Labianco via Compfight
Sim City, the old nineteen eighty-nine city building game. I’m sure every retro gamer has fond memories of this game. However, EA is at it again, with their DRM-happy nonsense.
They made a reboot of the series called Simcity, because ,you know, it’s trendy to name reboots after the original game. Gameplay-wise it was horrifically mediocre, however that isn’t what I’ll be talking about. I’m here to talk about the DRM. EA had decided that the best way to stop pirates was to force you to need a connection to the servers in order to play at all, even single player. This on its own wasn’t a very good idea, as not everyone has internet that transmits data as fast as a computer does locally.
However, the real kick in the teeth was that even paying customers who had purchased the game weren’t allowed to play. Why, you ask? It’s due to the fact that so many people went on the servers, that the servers collapsed and nobody could get on. This on it’s own wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, as it happened to Diablo III, if it weren’t for the fact that it took them several weeks to get it fixed. This naturally caused a bit of an uproar, though they didn’t seem to care in the slightest.
To make everything I just said seem more pleasant, this isn’t the end of the nightmare for paying customers. Also, this isn’t the end of the story, but that’s something for another blog post.