SimCity players to receive free PC game for their troubles

crysis3 or gtfo

Now if only EA could add “awlays-online” mandate to those “free” games and we will be set for a perfect future where nobody can play singleplayer and must always use “enhanced” connected features such as 2 hour queues at best.

@2 There’s really nothing dumber than a corporation. You have to hurt them to teach them.

It’s a nice gesture but means nothing as a digital copy of a game technically costs them nothing.

That was DUMB as F.

but, remember what Activision did with Diablo III 37 ERROR? NOTHING. They are much worse.

@3
Sadly I don’t think this will hurt them. They saw how well Dialbo 3 worked against piracy without losing sales. People vote for that with their wallets and soon forgot.

This kinda reminds me of Fight Club. Ed Norton talks about calculating the cost of recall versus lawsuits and other consumer problems. A lot of people are angry at EA but if a decent percentage of consumers:
A) Keeps clicking on those stupid, in-game banners for micro-transactions while being under EA’s surveillance for future study and micro offers
B) Are added thanks to offensive anti-piracy measures, then all of this is good in EA’s mind. They make the most money in short term and seeing how people always forget, they will probably benefit in the long term as well. The only casualties are the passionate gamers and poor devs.

Simcity really is an amazing game
I play this game for almost 10 hours and is just amazing

I’m glad i didn’t return this video game.

Thanks Stephany

I hope the free game is SimCity 4

@6 Time will tell. Simcity and Diablo are both mega franchises, and I would think that both are worth considerably less after this.

They’re now associated with these disasters, and the games themselves are soundly mediocre even without the networking woes.

Blizzard were definitely spooked following D3, more than I’ve ever seen, and I think at least Maxis are horrified at what they’ve done.

Whether that will actually rise to the executive aisle remains to be seen though. Corps are dumb.

And now people will roll over and forget it ever happened, because hey! Free games! And then they’ll go and get screwed YET again the next time, but hey! IT’S FREEEEEEE GAAAAAAAAMES… ONLY IDIOTS BITE ON THIS!.

How about people get a spine and actually stand up against these greedy bastards!. I see a lot of people here say i only will by this game and that game from EA. YOU will be a part of THIS problem if you do, SAY NO and vote with your wallet. Or else you are just going to get more of this bullshit in the future.

@10 You’re an idiot. I know I shouldn’t feed the troll but what the hell. EA is an extremely large corporation and people who are vocal against EA are a very small minority. There are gamers who don’t participate in the community and will still buy, not paying any attention to boycotting that people plan.

People wont boycott EA, they say they will. but then games like Fifa and Battlefield come out and people forget all about their so called boycotting.

I swear to god the gaming community is the dumbest community I have ever seen.

Even if you do manage to boycott them (which you wont, because people are full of air and nothing more), you will barely affect them, they are gaining money off of other companies as well (like Valve for example, as EA distribute all of Valve’s games).

Also @4 – yes, it does cost them, every game they give away isn’t a sale. They also have to pay for the upkeep of the digital storage in which they allow you to DL the game from. You’re statement is rather flawed.

Maybe the free game is Simpsons: Tapped Out :p

@11 A lost sale isn’t lost profit. It’s just a hypothetical on a piece of paper.

The expense involved for EA is going to be considerably less than if they had done the right thing and offered a refund as soon as they realized the extent of their fuck-up.

@13 – they have lost potential profit by not making that sale, therefore their profit margin’s are not as great. They will have lost a % of the profit (however meager) that they could have had by selling the game rather than giving it away.

#11 Froseidon

I HAVE ALREADY BOYCOTTED EA AND THESE GREEDY FECS AIN’T GETTING MY MONEY ANYMORE. IT IS THAT EASY. YEAH I WILL LOSE OUT ON A FEW GAMES, AND THAT I AM OKAY WITH. BECAUSE THERE ARE GAME COMPANIES OUT THERE MORE WORTHY MY CASH, I GLADLY PAY FOR THEIR GAMES. I AM FINISHED WITH EA FOR GOOD, AND TO BE HONEST IT IS A RELIEF. I SUGGEST ALL TO DROP EA GAMES, BECAUSE IF YOU BUY THEIR GAMES YOU WILL BE A PART OF THE PROBLEM TOO. SO DON’T BE A SUCKER, IT’S TIME TO SAY ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

@11: Are you saying that the entire community here is only representative of a small vocal minority? Because only you and perhaps one other person comes in here to defend this atrocious corporation. Everyone else is rightfully slamming it.

Down with EA!!

Booooooooo!!

@14 It sounds a bit hollow to be accusing others of ignorance when you’re using economy that shoddy.

“Potential profit” has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of loss. It’s purely imaginary.

Could’ve had, should’ve had, would’ve had. You can sit in a recliner and lament over it as an individual, but for business purposes it doesn’t exist. It is zero dollars and zero cents.

What matters to EA is that they’re keeping those 60 bucks and paying for them with a little bit of extra bandwidth. It’s still a good deal for them.

@9 Must be nice living in your imaginary world, DSB.

@ps3fanboy: this is PC territory, kid, you don’t belong here.
Go play in a park or whatever you do when you’re not trolling Xbox-related news.

@19, Dude, please don’t tell others where they belong. It makes you sound like a douche and we all know you aren’t one.

He has a valid point. If people would stand up in larger numbers and stop allowing the carrot to entice them, we could make change.

@19 Hope for the best and expect the worst.

Which is the most imaginary part to you though?

Blizzard may have touted Diablo III as a succes publicly, but their devs were whining on Facebook, it only took an unimportant post from one of the original devs to rile them on the very highest level, and the lead designer basically went as far as he could without openly apologizing for the game, and has now left the project entirely.

It may have been a commercial succes, but it was clearly a disaster in every other way. I’ve never seen Blizzard cop to a mistake before, so I’d say that makes it pretty huge.

I think it’s more than slightly optimistic to think that all 7 million would buy that game a second time. I wouldn’t.

So many gamers are outright pathetic! If something is not working or a game ends in a way you don’t like you rage on the internet like little children.

You are PATHETIC!

If people in general was like you we would have anarchy in the world. But thank God, most people are not as dumb in the heads as you lot are.

I just hope you are children as it seams most of you are in the way you write. Because if you are adults you should be ashamed of yourself and your parents should be ashamed for raising dumb fucks as you.

Sorry for the language but there is no nice words to use against the stupidity being shown from so many gamers.

Pathetic!

EDIT: This rambling is aimed at several commenting sections, sites,forums etc. So not necessarily this article. And again, sorry for the language but I am starting to outright dislike nay hate how some people are reacting.

I have boycotted EA and will do until they lose DRM for single player games with server-side saves. It is the principle of the this that bothers me. They are screwing their paying, loyal fans to get back at pirates and that is simply not fair.

I agree fully with Dan Stapleton @ ign:

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/03/08/simcity-burning-a-warning-to-microsoft-sony-and-all-publishers-on-the-dangers-of-always-online-drm

@ 22 – Why don’t you actually put your points across rather than abuse people with meaningless dribble?

@9
How do you know it is mediocre? You’ve said yourself in a previous statement you are boycotting all EA games. So that must surely mean you haven’t bought this game. And if you haven’t bought this, how can you have tried it? And if you haven’t tried it, how can you have an opinion on how good or bad it is?

@22, so if you buy something that doesn`t work – it`s pathetic to complain and complaining will lead to anarchy – lol ^_^

Stoopid gamers indeed.

How do you feel about surveys, market reseach and focus groups btw?

This board should be 18+ with an age verification process. I’m sick of reading ps3fanboy BS.

I completely agree with what CliffyB said earlier- vote with you wallets.
Unfortunately, people aren’t. Both Diablo 3 and Simcity have 2 things in common- they have always on DRM, and they are selling/sold well.
They wont change a damn thing unless their spreadsheets get a tinge of red, and trust me, that works wonders.

It’s a copy/paste from what I’ve wrote in another thread:
———————————————————————–
What I’ve called impossible is for things to always work the 1st time. In anything, not just games, some things just don’t work the 1st time. It can be a new car, a problem with a brand new house, a new law, etc…

Just to be clear, I’m not pro-EA. It could be any other company and I would do the same.

When Sony servers were hacked and down I defended Sony while people were saying they would never buy a Sony product again and “Sony sucks”…

Same thing with Activision and Diablo 3.

I’m not defending EA just because it’s EA, I’m defending them because I hate when I read all these stupid comments by people that think they’re experts in technology, better than everyone and think they’re kings and everything should work how they decided it should. And if not they cry like little babies. Spoiled child!

You can hate EA for many reasons but this launch is an isolated incident. I like EA games, they’re doing fine PC games and good ports and all my EA games work correctly, except SimCity. But considering all the other games I have from them that work correctly I know they’ll fix SimCity too. And it’s a good game.

I’m sure EA learned their lesson with this. If something like this would happen again in a close time frame I won’t take their defense anymore. But like I’ve written plenty of time, shit happens and I can accept that!

@24 Actually, I have a friend (with more money than sense) who has a duplicate account he lets others borrow, so I’ve had the opportunity to play it without it ever touching my own account.

My opinion is purely based on playing it a few hours, but in those few hours what I got was a mix of Cityville, The Sims and Simcity, which just wasn’t very satisfying at all.

The idea is to care for a tiny town (although there’s no chance of actually expanding like there would be in Cityville) doing trade with other tiny towns, cultivating your neighbourhoods Caesar/Anno style, and otherwise just watching people go about their daily business, or doing generic quests.

It’s quite dumbed down compared to the earlier games, and it’s currently full of bugs. Trading doesn’t work right and the simulation of traffic is beyond bad. As far as impressions go, I would much rather be playing Simcity 4. It would probably appeal to the Cityville/Sims crowd though.

My own Origin account consists of Battlefield 3 and The Saboteur. The Saboteur was bought before it became clear that EA were cutting out other platforms (and before Origin was called Origin) and my very poor excuse for buying Battlefield 3 is that my brother insisted that he’d buy it for me if I didn’t do it myself. So I was clearly “forced”

I’m not a pc gamer, but I feel the pain of you dweebs! Or course I fully expect your hardline stance to crumble like a sandcastle at hightide when BF4 is shown

@15 – You having no impact on EA except for single digit game sales they will not miss.

@16 – No, that’s not what I am saying, I am saying there is a part of the gaming community that we don’t see or hear from who are much larger than the vocal side of the community. The 15 or so people here are not the entire gaming community. There are people who buy games who never engage in the community side, and nor will they hear of this situation, and if they did, they wouldn’t care that much.

@18 – Find the word “ignorance” or anything relating to it in my post. Admittedly, saying the statement was flawed was a little too far. I merely said they will lose out on some profit, which they will. It can’t be argued that they will lose out. I never stated how much they will lose, and I agree, what they will lose will be unnoticeable in their finances.

@22 – The anger from people is understandable. If you buy a product that doesn’t work, you either want it working or a refund. However, people are a little impatient and wont wait for them to fix the servers. Gamers tend to think there is an instant fix to something, and if there isn’t, it is utter trash.

@31 It’s completely hypothetical whether they will lose or not, since there’s no telling whether people would’ve actually bought those games on their own accord.

That’s why it would never be used in any economic sense. The variables are endless and there’s positively no telling. The imaginary loss could be anywhere between zero or five million billion, and you’re really just projecting your own expectation between the two.

If they were giving people physical games or refunds, then you could start to talk about a loss.

Another example of imaginary economics would be to suggest that giving games away somehow sells new ones. Maybe someone will pick up the original Dead Space, love it, and buy either 2, or both 2 and 3 as a result.

It’s purely imaginary, and you have no way of proving or disproving that.

@32 – Hence why I said the loss would be meager (and by meager, I didn’t mean it was still noticeable). I also meant loss of potential profit, not an outright loss. They wont go into the red on a cash flow for this.

@31 Yes it is understandable that people are angry, I was not a happy gamer when Diablo 3 came out with all the problems connecting either.

It seams people have no idea how big or how much work there is having a server park running stable and ready for millions of people. Is it a excuse for EA?

No, but most people with that in mind takes a breather and gives it a few days for the tech heads to work it out. Not going postal on the internet like they have no life other then playing that particular game right away.

And in the end we PC gamers has brought this on our self. Millions are pirating games and this is one of the resoults of it…it’s time we as gamers face the consequence of our actions.

@34 Those of us who buy our games legally should accept being punished by publishers, because others don’t?

It doesn’t make any sense, and it doesn’t prevent piracy. It does give me a pretty good reason not to touch those games though.

The music industry had that approach for years. “Buy music according to our ancient customs or say hello to an army of lawyers”. All it did was lose their marketshare to torrents who were providing people with a better service than they were.

It’s not until very recently that they’ve been able to provide something approaching the same service, and as a result they’ve now started to turn losses into profits.

I was not online for 10 hours.I knew when im logging onto VG247, im gonna see a thread about Simcity. After seeing the title, I thought WOW, that real generous work from EA. I thought atleast now people will stop whine about EA for now. BUT WHEN I STARTED reading comments,

NO NO NO> PEOPLE STILL BOYCOTTING EA.

Cant believe this. as everyone can see, Maxis /EA never saw thought this game will sold like this. You can see,how much server load happened on the launch day from their words. They misjudged it. game getting fixed now. its only 4 days. Just calm down.

@29
Okay fair enough. I still think that playing a game like SimCity for a few hours isn’t enough to have a whole idea of how good or bad it is. But atleast it is better than than those stating their opinion without having even tried it

KICK EA IN THE BALLS WHILE THEY ARE DOWN!! GREEDY FECS DIIIIIIIIIIE!

@37 Yeah that’s fair enough. It is mindbogglingly simple though. It’s not like there’s a plot twist or a mechanic that was somehow locked away for later.

It was really just a question of waiting, planning better and seeing how far you could make your buildings grow. Pretty basic Caesar/Anno stuff.

@ 38 can u plz stop you Troll posts. This is a thread that grownups having a nice conversation. 12 years old kids arnt allowed here. plz go & post on Activition forums maybe.

@20 Dude, it’s saturday, I’m supposed to be resting (ie. playing at “sane” hours instead of 1-2am) and instead I’m working (actually writing about Stringer’s retirement for the site I work for).
I have no will to make articulate arguments to people whose maximum syntactic achievement is “KICK EA IN THE BALLS WHILE THEY ARE DOWN!! GREEDY FECS DIIIIIIIIIIE!”

The fact is simple.
We knew almost from the start that the game was going to have always on DRM.
I personally hoped that EA would create a network structure able to withstand the many connections that would be made on release day, but sadly EA let us down, or likely the people in charge with the network have let EA and everyone else down.

It’s both their fault for not setting up the necessary amount of servers and bandwidth, and EA’s for not pushing up the release day when even the reviewers network wasn’t working perfectly.

I think EA is in enough trouble now that the damage is done: they have stopped the marketing campaign, they are giving out free games on Origin (and they DO COST ANYWAY), and it’s undeniable many potential buyers will wait many weeks (months?) before purchasing the game, if at all.
This means heavy repercussions in EA’s FY2013 and FY2014 earnings. We’re talking millions of $, not just your 60$.

Going beyond and boycotting EA “just because” is purely immature, a consequence of people not knowing what’s behind the games they play (or ignoring the stories people like Stephany, Dave, Pat, etc. duly report).

One thing is me throwing shit at Activision because its CEO is a greedy bastard that killed every other franchise in their portfolio to focus in just CALL OF DUTY CALL OF DUTY CALL OF DUTY (although I purchased Prototype 2 at day one and loved it) and another is people boycotting all EA games because they fucked up with one release.

This failure, though, should be a warning sign for the big publishers and hardware manufacturers about the next-gen and the digital divide around the world.
Before discarding the physical media and going “full online” in the next-gen, these people should take in account the costs of setting up the required network infrastuctures, or else face dire failure.
I haven’t read Dan Stapleton’s piece (no time), but I think we share some view points.

@41 – SOMEONE SPEAKS SENSE! CHECK THE SKIES, ARE THE PIGS FLYING YET?

And since IGN did a piece, not it’s GameSpot’s turn:
http://uk.gamespot.com/features/simcity-shows-the-dark-side-of-online-gaming-6405058/

(Love the Sonic 2 pic though)

Post updated with tweets from Bradshaw – apparently, Maxis has no intention “at this time” of taking the game offline, but they are “definitely looking” into it.

@44
Thanks for the update.

Sadly, they already had to sacrifice the city size in favor of always online so, regardless of that patch / decision, part of SimCity charm (As a series) is already lost.

Feel bad for Maxis, those game-devs busted there asses for 10 years(to make SimCity 5) and EA screwed up less in 1 minutes… i really hoped that Maxis become independence again and public there own games like the early age…

Usual “passionate gamer” over reaction. Yeah there was a few problems, it’s still a great game.

Depending on what the game offered actually is, Erth was right and you could be offered absolutely nothing for your troubles.

And this is only because it’s EA as usual. No one kicked up half as much of a problem when GW2 wasn’t accessible at first. Same old same old, selective gamer hate at its best.

I guess i’m in the minority.. I want the game but found the pricing extortionate. That put me off more than anything, so I’m just gonna wait a few months and get it when it’s fairly priced.

@48
Completely agree with you there. The price for SimCity is extremely high. I wasn’t going to purchase it. Then i got a call last week that i got a new job and then i bought it instantly x) But yeah, the price is outragous IMO.

@47 Don’t get me wrong, it is better than nothing, and EA didn’t have to do it. There was no obligation. If it makes people feel better, great.

I just think Froseidon was kidding himself if he didn’t also see the benefit to EA of doing this, as opposed to offering refunds. It’s ridiculous to call it a sacrifice when EA are still keeping peoples money.

A refund would cost them 60 dollars, this costs them a bit of extra bandwidth and keeps them comfortably in the plus.

It’s very clever, and kudos for that, but it’s also a means to avoid making the genuine sacrifice.