Frank Gibeau, looking awfully smug for a guy who doesn’t know what the f–k he’s talking about.
So, you have to be connected online to play SimCity, even though an online connection isn’t required to run any of the game’s core processes. It seems like a fairly clear case of EA forcing gamers to play online in order to deter piracy, but no! No no no! EA totally hates those kind of strict anti-piracy measures! Here’s EA Labels President Frank Gibeau really giving DRM the business…
“DRM is a failed dead-end strategy; it’s not a viable strategy for the gaming business.”
Bam! Take that DRM! But then wait…why does SimCity need to be online again?
“For the folks who have conspiracy theories about evil suits at EA forcing DRM down the throats of Maxis, that’s not the case at all.
At no point in time did anybody say ‘you must make this online’. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience and when you’re building entertainment…you don’t always know what the customer is going to want. You have to innovate and try new things and surprise people and in this particular case that’s what we sought to achieve. If you play an MMO, you don’t demand an offline mode, you just don’t. And in fact, SimCity started out and felt like an MMO more than anything else and it plays like an MMO.”
So there you have it dumbass consumers — you went in expecting SimCity to be some sort of, I dunno, city building simulation, but no, it’s an MMO! Everyone likes MMOs right? When you pick up a game that’s not advertised as an MMO it’s totally cool if it turns out to be an MMO, because hey, who would want to play anything else when they could be playing an MMO?
Also, it’s totally okay for an MMO to not actually work or let you log in, right?
I’m begging you EA, hire or promote somebody who actually has a f–king clue about how video games work.