
SimCity Burning: A Warning to Publishers on The Dangers of Always-Online DRM - ScotterC
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/08/simcity-burning-a-warning-to-microsoft-sony-and-all-publishers-on-the-dangers-of-always-online-drm
======
Irregardless
> _There's also the question of preserving gaming history. As we saw with THQ
> last month, publishers aren't immortal. They can die, and had THQ
> implemented always-online DRM in Darksiders II, all copies of that game
> might've died with it when the rights to the series weren't bought up by
> another publisher._

That's the part that concerns me the most. I still install (and play) lots of
old games on every computer I own -- King's Quest VI, C&C: Red Alert, Worms:
Armageddon, etc. And who could live without the console classics like
Goldeneye or Ocarina of Time? All you have to do is pull out the disc (or
cartridge), pop it in, and play.

We still don't know exactly what will happen with this new generation of games
that consumers are merely "renting" from companies like EA, but piracy seems
to be our only guaranteed method of preserving them. What happens if you want
to play Battlefield 3 again 10 years from now? You might be able to access it
IFF:

    
    
       1. Your account is still in good standing (not banned)
       2. EA still exists
       3. EA has decided to maintain support for Origin
       4. EA has decided to maintain support for Battlefield 3
       5. You remember your PW or can prove to EA you're the account owner
    

There's not much history to base this speculation on yet, but what little we
do have shows that that's an extremely unlikely scenario. If there's any
chance to preserve the games we're playing now, it's probably up to us to make
it happen.

~~~
danielweber
_but piracy seems to be our only guaranteed method of preserving them_

You aren't going to pirate Sim City 5.

This is the future of gaming. Companies are just going to avoid all the grief
of piracy and weird DRM by either moving to locked-down platforms (iOS and
consoles) or into games that have essential online components.

It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. I'd love to by a game and install it on my
PC without it taking things over, and the publishers would love to write that
and not worry about DRM. But we can't get that because each of us doesn't
trust the other party to defect.

~~~
drobati
This is not the future of gaming. Look at how badly SimCity flopped.

Let me compare to DotA2 which I play a lot. It's exclusively multiplayer and
thus needs an internet connection, yet it's free to play. How much have I
spent on it? At this point at least $75+ dollars. THIS IS THE FUTURE OF
GAMING.

Valve has the right model. I know valve didn't create the F2P model but it has
implemented it the best as far as I know. They have pulled more money out of
me giving me a free game then they would have made if they sold me 60+ copy.

EA should of just given out free copies of SimCity. Given out free copies with
enough features to keep me entertained without the need to spend money. Then
releasing toolsets for modders to create items; resell them to us for profit.

The DLC will surely be created but based on how EA conducts DLC in The Sims 3,
I expect expensive expansions and stuffer packs.

~~~
danielweber
Online-only play is _exactly_ what I am talking about as the (dystopian)
future of gaming. Pushing more and more of the game into the cloud, so it
becomes SaaS instead of worrying about DRM.

Freemium versus pay-up-front are both flavors of that.

Do we know that SimCity "flopped"? It's gotten lots of people angry at it, but
that's not at all the same as not making money.

~~~
drobati
Oh I'm sorry I misunderstood. Well at this point I guess we could say it's at
least on pause and certainly not a success.

------
mjn
Quip seen on Twitter [1]: "Disabling features of SimCity due to ineffective
central infrastructure is probably the most realistic simulation of the modern
city."

[1] <https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/309756131155271680>

------
ryusage
It's an interesting case study. This happens with nearly every MMO and people
grumble but accept it. Within a couple weeks, the server issues are mostly
resolved and people don't think about it anymore.

And yet, people are _pissed_ about this. The fact that people see the game as
single player seems to make a huge difference. It seems the lesson is that, if
you want to do the always-on thing, you need to design your game so that it
doesn't even make sense to play it alone.

I'm really curious to see what SimCity's sales are like in a month though. I
wouldn't be too terribly shocked if people just sucked it up and bought it
anyway as long as the servers are stable. If that happens, then maybe EA
didn't make such a mistake after all?

~~~
Irregardless
Server woes are a necessary evil with MMOs, and people buy the game knowing
they'll have to deal with some amount of downtime due to maintenance,
overcrowding or just plain growing pains.

Try telling FPS players that their game will be unavailable every Tuesday
morning for 6-12 hours and they'll probably riot -- that's standard downtime
in the MMO world though.

~~~
outworlder
No, that's actually standard WOW downtime. Check out Eve Online. They've been
gradually decreasing downtime.

Last time I played, it was like 30 minutes every day, with 15 minutes just for
the cluster to reboot (the client has a nice server status, with a countdown
and ETA). Their goal was to reduce it to zero (it was 1 hour when I first
started playing).

~~~
Irregardless
WoW has similarly minor downtime most weeks, but the point still stands: MMO
players are willing to tolerate significantly longer and more frequent
interruptions due to the nature of the games and the architecture necessary to
support them.

I don't know how much simulation is being done server-side or how resource
intensive it is, but if the Sim City of 10+ years ago was possible without it,
I'm pretty sure EA could've done this one without it as well. Smells like an
excuse to me.

------
b3b0p
If they had called this Sim City Online and marketed as not the next Sim City,
but more of an MMO like Ever Quest, Guild Wars, and Star Wars Galaxies would
be people be complaining as much if they knew they had to be online to play
it.

Sim City 4, 2000, and the original still run perfect and are extremely fun to
play. Sim City 4 is on Steam even making it easy to get right now. I'm tempted
to pick that up since I have not played it. I loved the original and 2000
though.

~~~
cpprototypes
Yeah I agree, how can a mega billion company like EA fail so badly on
marketing. Strategy should've been simple:

1) release it as sim city online, with marketing emphasizing it's like a sim
city mmo. People will be more tolerant of launch network issues. Make lots of
$$$

2) later release single player sim city 5 (just rip out online parts from
above) make more $$$

Such an inept company.

~~~
toyg
The problem is that, realistically, "SimCity Online" would have bombed. City-
building isn't a co-op game, and SimCity customers are not co-op gamers.
CitiesXL tried to market itself as that, and it bombed, so now they de-
emphasize the online aspects.

The ugly truth remains the same: this game is "social" just as an excuse to
implement hardcore DRM. Sugar-coating.

~~~
clauretano
The game honestly works quite well if you do think of it as a co-op game. A
real life friend made a region, and I founded a city in his region.

You can do things like: \- volunteer excess services such as fire trucks,
police cars, trash pickup, recycling trucks. The last one there can be
lucrative if you use the raw materials you collect to build processors. \- buy
water/power/etc utility capacity on an as-needed basis. Instead of having a
brownout if your city grows but you forgot to scale up your electricity
production, it'll just buy some automatically from other cities in the region
\- town hall upgrade modules, such as the "department of transportation" which
allows more transit options (train/ferry), "department of education" that
allows colleges and universities, etc are shared with the region. Each time
you level up your city hall you are allowed to add one of the department
modules. Eventually you get to a point where you need over 290k citizens, but
want some of the upgrades from a department you haven't built yet. A
neighboring city can build those departments to help you out. \- After
spending a bunch of money on university research and applying for a great
works project, cities can contribute the resources needed to build these large
scale products, and all the cities in the region benefit. Great works projects
are things like a major airport, a huge solar collector (the size of a city),
a space program, etc. Some bring tourists, some provide resources, etc.

The game is extremely social, but if you'd like you can ignore it. I'm in
agreement with everyone here that if you want to ignore the social and play
offline, you should be able to.

~~~
Maxious
The co-op features do not work
[http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/03/05/why-this-is-
not-...](http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/03/05/why-this-is-not-a-one-
star-review-of-simcity/)

------
jl6
12 years ago I quit gaming because decent titles weren't available for Linux.
I now have a great job and family, part of which I attribute to spending
thousands of hours learning about life and technology instead of playing
games.

Give it up people, video games = fast-forwarding your life.

(Actually I'm not really suggesting being that strict. I did return to play
the occasional top title like Portal 2, but on a strictly controlled diet.
Gaming should be a small enough part of your life that such DRM is a non-
issue)

~~~
lotharbot
My wife did excellent work on a training simulator, and regularly impressed
both the military customer and higher ups on the corporate side.

She credited three video games with building her most impressive skills:
Descent taught her to visualize and maneuver in 3D space, Starcraft taught her
to think about force composition and disposition, and Nethack taught her to
make thousands of decisions (and type thousands of characters) without making
mistakes.

She still games pretty extensively (she'll be taking Tuesday off for the SC2
expansion), and has a great job and family. And at least part of her
excellence is due to the way she uses video games to sharpen her mind.

~~~
lttlrck
Descent... well you needed as certain aptitude to play that game well. A
degree in three-dimensional awareness would also have helped.

------
kyrra
Having played simcity as much as the servers have allowed since launch, there
are definitely a number of online tie-ins. I'm sure they could have done it
with player run servers or LAN type connectivity, but it removes the social
aspect of the game. I rather line being able to look at the leader board, then
load the cities listed there to see what they look like.

Playing with a few friends in a region is a pretty cool idea, though there are
fewer interactions as I would have liked, there are still a lot.

Their server connectivity is definitu beyond just DRM, but it's hard to say
how they could have done their design without the server aspect.

~~~
DocG
All your city is managed in your local PC. Everything runs fine, only saving
is cloud. Proof is that people have played though server crashes without
noticing, up to 40 minutes.

But, region management is server side.

So basically, if one manages to skip log in and makes save-s local then one
can play single city offline.

This is as much information as I have at the moment.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I bet this will be cracked and people will be running private or client-side
server emulators inside two weeks.

------
seanoliver
I've been looking forward to this game for years now. I thought it would never
come. And now that it's here I'm totally saddened and appalled that EA would
ruin such an incredible legacy for such petty reasons.

There has to be another way to stem piracy without totally obliterating the
value of an otherwise excellent game...

~~~
samsolomon
It is unfortunate. I've also been waiting on this game for years. On the plus
side there are some entertaining 5-star reviews.

[http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-Limited-Edition-Pc/product-
rev...](http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-Limited-Edition-Pc/product-
reviews/B007FTE2VW/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_5?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addFiveStar&showViewpoints=0)

------
jfoutz
If anyone could achieve a decent launch, it's blizzard. They have a lot of
money and talent, and a real attention to detail. They're willing to wait to
ship games "till they're ready"

But launch still eludes them. I've purchased every game through Diablo 3, but
that put me off the whole thing. Heart of the swarm will be the first Blizzard
game i just don't bother with. The launch will be a disaster. Since they've
taken away any reason for me to get excited about the launch, i've found that
really leaks over into my excitement about the game.

Good luck to EA, good luck to Blizzard, you've committed your businesses to a
technical infrastructure you're just not competent to build or manage. Seems
like a risky strategy to me. Especially because games aren't really that
important. It's not critical like food. There are a bunch of other offerings
available.

~~~
toki5
> But launch still eludes them. I've purchased every game through Diablo 3,
> but that put me off the whole thing. Heart of the swarm will be the first
> Blizzard game i just don't bother with. The launch will be a disaster.

This seems to me a bold claim to make. Diablo III's launch was, in many ways,
a huge new service for them, a new infrastructure to test and maintain, and
they were quick to fix issues with it. Compare this to the launch of The
Burning Crusade expansion pack -- it was a rough launch! -- but over time,
they managed to smooth their systems out such that now, even a content launch
as huge as Mists of Pandaria went smoothly.

WoW is a different game, but it illustrates their iterative healing process.
Since the Wings of Liberty launch went smoothly, I wouldn't expect anything
less of Heart of the Swarm, as it's being released on a system that's here,
ready, polished, and tested. We might see a few hiccups, but nothing close to
Diablo III.

I'd hardly call Battle.net an infrastructure that Blizzard is "just not
competent to build or manage."

~~~
jfoutz
Although you'll never see this, aside from a few achievement issues, HotS
launch went well. Mea culpa.

------
error54
Can someone explain what exactly happened with SimCity? From the article I
gather that it had something to do with DRM but the author never explained
what exactly made it unplayable.

~~~
criley
Trouble downloading and installing the game, massive login queues (that
recheck the queue once every 30 minutes), trouble creating cities, troubles
loading creating cities, disconnections, features have been removed to help
handle stress, etc.

Basically, it's hard to get it downloaded and installed.

If you do that, it's very difficult to login to play.

If you manage that, it's very difficult to do the tutorial or claim a city or
load your city.

If you manage that, it's very difficult to play the game without experiencing
disconnects or server-related dysfunction that directly affects gameplay.

Basically, it's nothing like the experience they wanted to deliver.

~~~
sageikosa
They should probably have an "achievement" for passing each of those hurdles;
turn the task of running a game into a game itself...

~~~
nwh
Achievements are disabled at the moment, so that wouldn't work either.

------
stcredzero
_> let it be yet another lesson to publishers like EA and Activision/Blizzard,
and platform owners Microsoft and Sony, who may be considering always-on DRM
in next-gen consoles or PC games: don't even think about it. It's a pipe
dream_

But this is Always-Online DRM _done wrong_. You _DO NOT_ prioritize prevention
of pirate-enabled playing of your game. You _DO NOT_ implement anything which
causes legitimate users to not be able to play. You _DO_ prioritize UX over
anything else at launch. You bias _heavily_ to avoid false positives. Legit
users (i.e. customers) are your first priority -- as they should be.

Most of all, you do not live in the fantasy world of DRM being some kind of
impenetrable fortress. Basically, the resources of the entire Internet are
arrayed against you, and the forces on your side constitute several hundred
people in your company _at most._ You as the game publisher aren't the evil
empire. You're the guerrillas. You don't have a vast army and an impenetrable
fortress. You have a few fighters on your side and a jungle to hide in.

Here is what you do: You prioritize detection. You _let the pirates play._ You
let the pirates believe that they've broken your DRM by throwing some honeypot
DRM at them for them to break. All the while, you're detecting them. Then,
when they think they've won, you use assets that you _can_ control (servers)
to restrict the pirate-enabled users you've detected. The point here is to be
the one to keep the pirates guessing, not the other way around. Let them
announce cracks, then make sure they get egg on their face a week after
_their_ "release -- again and again. Basically, you fight dirty to make sure
that your product is far superior to the pirate's.

The way to have DLC in the modern age is to make sure that a key element of
your "DLC" always stays on the server.

------
rohern
I do not understand the gamer community. EA has been treating you guys like
crap for years and you keep coming back for more. Just stop buying their
products. I know it sucks not to have access to a new game, but make a stand
for an industry you care about and stop supporting a lousy company that has
distain for you.

------
jwr
I treat anything that is DRM-encumbered as a rental, and make buying decisions
accordingly. It is not something I own, and I do not expect to be able to use
it beyond a certain time horizon (a year or two).

Same goes for DRM-protected books or music.

~~~
npsimons
Same here; only difference is, I don't _rent_ books, music, movies, games or
software. Sell me a copy, or lose a sale.

------
zerohm
I'm sorry but as a gaming enthusiast, I'm experiencing some major
schadenfreude here.

EA's tactics, ethics and influence have been the worst in the industry for the
last 10 years. Pushing DRM, buying up smaller studios, releasing endless add-
on packs and DLC. Thankfully I haven't been addicted to any of their games
since Dungeon Keeper. That was a great game.

------
rozap
I feel so sorry for guys and girls responsible for keeping the systems up and
running at EA. Days without sleep, without a doubt. And I'm sure their
managers are cracking the whips and blaming all the bad things an them.

It just makes me sad to think of :(

------
ScotterC
I've been kind of surprised by ign's writing lately. They've gotten a lot more
thoughtful, past the simple game review writing and have much more intelligent
pieces these days.

------
zdgman
I don't actually think this is a danger of always on DRM more growing pains
from an industry (gaming) that is learning how to build infrastructure that
can scale to the size of their audience. Games are going to move toward
becoming services just like any popular web app you use in your day to day
life and I am not mad about that. I don't ever give a second though to whether
Pivotal Tracker, Evernote or Flickr will be around in a few years, I accept
the thought that may not be and use the tools because I enjoy them.

Gaming as a medium is trying to evolve and find a business model that can
allow them to scale games to audiences that are bigger and trying to make them
more complex without having to tap into all the power your computer / console
may have. I have worked in the game industry and while I can support people
being upset and I am more interested in how this impacts the type of gameplay
experiences we have in the future.

I would be interested in seeing startups spring up around supporting cloud
infrastructure and analytics for game companies. Sort of like an amazon for
Game Devs

------
ry0ohki
Can someone confirm that the online mode offers nothing but DRM? The fact that
they had to disable Cheetah speed makes me think they really are offloading
some of the game simulations to the servers. It certainly feels like a much
speedier game then SimCity 4 (when it works).

~~~
danielweber
Parts of the game logic are run on the server.

I don't expect more game companies to stay away from this; I expect them to do
this a lot more for PC gaming. Probably not explicitly, but as much as people
in /r/technology insists piracy doesn't matter, the companies continue to
care. With online games, the need to worry about that largely evaporates.

Instead, I expect companies to put in proper rate limiting, fallbacks, and
plan for the ability to spin up extra servers in case of high demand.

~~~
fennecfoxen
"Parts of the game logic are run on the server." By which they mean: storage
of save-games, and resource trading with your city-neighbors.

That is ALL.

~~~
betterunix
If I remember SimCity correctly, saved games are pretty important. One can
only get so far without saving...

~~~
kd0amg
They are, but leaving the description at "parts of the game logic" could be
taken to mean the servers are being used to offload compute-intensive tasks.
Centralization for the sake of performance is understandable, but not allowing
offline saves sounds more like centralization for the sake of centralization.

~~~
winthrowe
I think that the regional city interactions and global market count as 'parts
of the logic'. I agree it's not compute intensive, but it is fairly central to
the design of the new SimCity. No reason the region couldn't be locally
simulated IMO, however.

------
ignostic
I dunno, you don't see the outcry when the thing is reliably up and working
correctly. I play several games that are "always on" or "internet only," and
we gamers seem completely fine with it as long as up-time is 99.99%.

People bought the game knowing the DRM would be heavy. That's not what's
killing SimCity. The real reason this failed is because it broke. It crashed
and burned terrifically. It was implemented poorly, and it was really
unreliable.

The warning here is this: make shit that works. We would see the same outcry
if an offline game crashed regularly, deleted saves, and had bugs on opening
day that made it unplayable.

------
davidroberts
Having been required to defend undefensible companies policies in some
customer service jobs I previously held, I feel really sorry for the customer
service agent here. Probably somebody hoping to use this job as a leg up to
something better, but now he is stuck in angry customer hell with nothing to
do but quote policies that make them angrier. And his performance is probably
being judged based on some customer satisfaction survey where even one
unsatisfied customer is enough to lose a month's worth of bonuses.

------
diminoten
So can I pirate this bad boy? What's the status of the crack?

~~~
danielweber
It's an online game. Pirating it is about as feasible as running a pirate copy
of google.com.

~~~
illuminate
"It's an online game. Pirating it is about as feasible as running a pirate
copy of google.com"

What a silly, untrue statement. A better analogy would be "as feasible as
running a copy of World of Warcraft offline", which people do.

~~~
sgarman
Which in a way relates to Irregardless's post
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5345217>. One of my favorite MMO's
Ragnarok Online won't get locked away and lost when Gravity decides to close
it down, there are plenty of backends and open source projects that support
the game.

~~~
illuminate
I really prefer playing shards to the original game. Less/no grind, I can whiz
through most of a MMO including the minimal story in a few months, the price
isn't necessarily the issue, I just don't care to compete with millions of
other people and devote several days a week to survive at that level and stay
up to date (let alone be on "top".)

I want to have fun, I don't need artificial constraints to surpass. Thank
goodness for these emulators, which are fun now and will continue to be fun
when pocket-sized in the future :)

------
ptaipale
Don't know if this is real, but some claim that EA have had fake Facebook
accounts to defend them, and then someone screwed up. Link to pic on a humor
page: <http://naurunappula.com/1050795/ea-on-paras-d-ja-drm-d>

Could happen, and if true, a bit embarrassing. If not true, shows how people
want to hurt them.

------
ddunkin
It sounds like the torrent version is going to be awesome when it comes out,
all the features we want without the BS in the way.

------
chinpokomon
The truly disappointing thing to me, was that I was really excited and looking
forward to playing Spore. That is another Maxis game produced by EA that I've
completely lost interest in because of the DRM. From the sound of it, I need
to stay away from this one too. It is as though EA doesn't want my money.

------
rikacomet
I somehow saw this coming as recent as Sim City 4. But all in all, this is
proving to be a good improvement, but a bad implementation. What is even the
need of the online DRM? is this another of those: " Try to save billions of
dollars from piracy, that do not exist " ?

I was planning to buy this game, now I don't.

------
Pherdnut
Why does it have to be a warning to publishers? Clearly customers keep coming
back or they wouldn't keep repeating the same idiotic behavior. I'm not sure I
feel sorry for anybody in this case other than the guy who was such a non-
gamer he never heard of DRM.

------
timc3
I have been waiting to pay and play this for months now, even to the point of
upgrading hardware. I was even part of the Beta.

Well I am going to vote with my dollars and not buy it. Probably ever. If it
worked offline it would have been a different story.

------
uptown
Ironic that this is happening on a game that's all about mitigating disasters.

~~~
Armbrs
It's all part of their plan. Now that everyone claims to know what EA should
have done, they're primed to buy the sequel, SimServer. Where you get to
layout the network infrastructure for a new online game.

------
seanc722
Oi... Don't get me started. I loved when my cousin would bring his PC over and
we would just sit there playing CnC, Diablo or SC in LAN. Now we have to go
online for everything and there is frequently issues.

------
ashleyblackmore
My experience of this article:

1) Read opening text 2) See container (presumably a video) with no
explanation. I cannot load the video. 3) Read next paragraph to see what the
video was about. No explanation. Close tab.

------
jamespitts
I predict that EA will cave-in to some extent and release a modified version
of Sim City.

Let the game be used in the manner that the vast majority of your paying
customers prefer, or suffer a major loss of reputation.

~~~
illuminate
"I predict that EA will cave-in to some extent and release a modified version
of Sim City"

Doubtful.

------
suresk
Perhaps its because I play MMOs and other online-only games, but the endless
complaining about DRM and always-online play is getting a little boring.

What I have to wonder, though, is how they botched the launch so badly. They
know when they are launching, they (should) roughly know how many users each
server can support, and they should have a rough idea of how many games they
are going to sale in the first few days.

How did they screw it up?

Is forecasting game purchases that inexact? I'd think you could derive a
number at least close to being accurate from the amount of pre-sales, then
multiply it by some factor to give yourself some safety. At the very least,
you'd think there'd be contingency plans for quickly standing up new servers
in response to demand.

------
rdl
They seem to have fixed most of the performance problems in the last couple
days. Still not sure why they couldn't have done this correctly from the
start, but it's at least not horrible now.

------
borgchick
I also miss the days when you could just start up a BF2 server on your LAN and
have your family and friends join the game for some fun.

------
Kiro
Am I the only one who has no problem with always-online DRM? In what
situations don't you have internet nowadays?

~~~
dragontamer
The real question is: in what situation do you not have internet connection OR
the server is down.

In this case, it appears the server has been down for a significant number of
players. Therefore, many people can't play... even if everything is fine on
your end.

Things get worse however. According to one of the links, EA's servers seem to
have a corruption issue as well:
[http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2013/03/BEvZ...](http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2013/03/BEvZyQfCQAAlekP.jpg)

If you can't trust that your city will be there tomorrow due to EA's shoddy
servers, then there is very little incentive to even play the game. I guess it
might happen with a local save as well... but local saves of a game seems like
an easier problem to solve.

------
berlinbrown
Is the game any good?

------
Buzaga
2591 1 star ratings of 2805 total LOL!

[http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-Limited-Edition-
Pc/dp/B007FTE2...](http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-Limited-Edition-
Pc/dp/B007FTE2VW/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t)

I'm thinking this fail may be so epic it can kill always-on-DRM forever, force
EA to back up on their customer-pissing force-feeding stuff like this

I'm not in the gaming industry, but launch is probably the most important
event and, with this, they fucked the launch of one of the most adored, famous
and known PC game franchises of the World

Firstly, the game reviews will suffer forever(that amazon rating is probably
NEVER cease to be 1 star [unless EA starts paying chinese to do that too]),
that must cost sales

Secondly and most important, word-of-mouth must account for A LOT of game
sales, the hype of your friends, co-workers talking about a game must be the
reason for most of non-hardcore-gamers sales... I, for example, only bought
Diablo 3 because all my co-workers wouldn't shut about getting it, even tho I
was a hardcore gamer in the past, played Diablo and Diablo 2, I wouldn't buy
if it wasn't for the hype... people are PISSED and EA is probably losing a ton
of money because of it

I'm almost certain this DRM will ultimately cost them considerably more than
piracy would take, it's perfect!

As we say in Brazil: Time comes and the whip hits your own ass!

