You’d think by now that anybody who works for EA would be braced for somebody to bring up DRM software. But, apparently not, as the Maxis guys quickly discovered.
A Reddit AMA with the SimCity team quickly turned into about what you’d expect when this question came up:
What will happen to the game if I am playing and lose my internet connection – will the game still be playable and update the servers when my internet connection resumes or will it pause and wait for the connection?
The answer?
“I actually just ran over to our online engineering team to get the latest info. We do handle “short” internet outages gracefully. Meaning, if your internet goes out while you’re logged in and playing the game, we can can recover gracefully. You shouldn’t notice a thing. “Short” is still being defined.”
As you may have guessed from the header images, that went over almost as well as you’d expect. Reddit being Reddit, there’s a nice big pile of anti-DRM comments for you to browse through, ranging from the polite to the… expected.
It’s a bit unfortunate that Maxis is the one stuck dealing with this crap. Most game developers don’t care, particularly, about DRM. It’s not like SimCity isn’t going to sell a huge pile of copies anyway, and as Redditors note, most of them understand the need for DRM. Just not the need for DRM that’s always connected to the Internet.
For our part, we’ve taken away two important lessons here. One is to never go into an AMA without being prepared for it to go wrong.
The second is that there aren’t nearly enough photos of angry mobs with torches on the Internet.
Thanks to our very own Surly Badger for the tip!