{"id":19378,"date":"2013-03-11T11:13:26","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T16:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=19378"},"modified":"2013-03-11T11:18:15","modified_gmt":"2013-03-11T16:18:15","slug":"chris-kluwe-on-the-pr-disaster-that-was-the-simcity-5-launch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/03\/11\/chris-kluwe-on-the-pr-disaster-that-was-the-simcity-5-launch\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Kluwe on the PR disaster that was the SimCity 5<\/em> launch"},"content":{"rendered":"

In addition to his “day job” as the punter for the Minnesota Vikings, and his public advocacy role in pushing for same-sex marriage, Chris Kluwe is also a gamer. In this latter persona, he was invited to review the new SimCity 5<\/em> release from EA games<\/a> on behalf of PC Gamer<\/em>. Business Insider<\/em> had to bleep out a fair bit of raw Kluwe-ism in the aftermath:<\/p>\n

Hi. I\u2019m Chris. I\u2019ve been playing SimCity<\/em> ever since the Super Nintendo version, and I\u2019ve always been a huge fan of the franchise (SimCity 3000<\/em> is my favorite). Thus, when PC Gamer<\/em> came to me and said \u201cHey Chris! We want you to play the new SimCity 5<\/em> with us in our Celebrity SimCity region,\u201d I wasted no time in responding with a resounding \u201cHell yeah!\u201d<\/p>\n

I mean, what could go wrong?<\/p>\n

(Other than the inevitable giant lizards, meteor showers, and poor sewage planning that happen in every SimCity<\/em> game)<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

At the time of writing this piece, SimCity 5<\/em> has been active for almost 62 hours. Of those 62 hours, I\u2019ve been able to log in for around ten. Of those ten, four consisted of massive latency issues and corrupted games, so (quick calculation here), I\u2019ve had access to the actual game for maybe 10 percent of the time I\u2019ve had it. EA\u2019s servers are, to put it bluntly, utterly bug[redacted], and there\u2019s no option to play the game offline.<\/p>\n

Therein lies the heart of my problem. SimCity<\/em> is, at its heart, a single player game. Having access to other players\u2019 cities is cool, but I want to build MY city, and I don\u2019t want some [redacted], totally unnecessary \u201calways on\u201d DRM to keep me from playing the game (full disclosure: PC Gamer<\/em> was kind enough to provide me with a download code for the game, so you can only imagine my rage levels if I had actually put money into EA\u2019s pockets for this \u201cexperience\u201d).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And now the math:<\/p>\n

Sadly, EA seems to have failed to do some very simple math. Let\u2019s look at an example. We\u2019ll assume that for an amazingly successful game like SimCity<\/em>, about 20,000 people will end up pirating it (those who have the technical knowhow and Internet savvy to find a working crack). I have 160,000 Twitter followers, of whom around 50,000 follow me for gaming. I just told those 50,000 people NOT to buy SimCity<\/em> because EA cannot handle its s***, and the game is unplayable. We\u2019ll say half those people listen to me and haven\u2019t bought the game already. Soooo, carrying the pi, we see that EA is already out 5,000 more sales than if they had just created a normal, single player offline capable game with multiplayer components.<\/p>\n

(Don\u2019t forget, \u201calways on\u201d DRM also screws over people who don\u2019t have access to Internet for large periods of time, like rural areas and travelers. More lost sales!)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In addition to the bad PR of a terrible launch experience, EA is also reportedly refusing to process refunds to purchasers despite having made this an explicit promise<\/em> in their pre-release information package.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In addition to his “day job” as the punter for the Minnesota Vikings, and his public advocacy role in pushing for same-sex marriage, Chris Kluwe is also a gamer. In this latter persona, he was invited to review the new SimCity 5 release from EA games on behalf of PC Gamer. Business Insider had to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,14],"tags":[474,378,468,51,92],"class_list":["post-19378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-gaming","tag-chriskluwe","tag-drm","tag-piracy","tag-pr","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-52y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19378"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19380,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19378\/revisions\/19380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}