EA’s Building Problems

This week has seen a classic example of how a publisher can make a decision about a product that completely undermines the hard work of the creators.

‘Sim City’ is an excellent franchise; I remember playing the original back on the SNES and its successor on the PC and like many others was happy to see Maxis scoring great reviews for their fifth entry in the series.

However, that was before it went live. EA has included in it always-on DRM to combat piracy. Basically if you don’t have an internet connection you can’t play it as the game needs to constantly communicate with EA’s servers to prove it’s a genuine connection. The implications for those of us who want to play it on a laptop in locations without a stable net connection aside, this only works if EA’s servers can handle the traffic and this week showed that they couldn’t with many frustrated games players unable to play the game they paid hard earned cash for and leading to shops like Amazon taking it off sale.

And just to fan the flames of a building already on fire those who bought it digitally are unable to get a refund and those who can play it have found their cities hidden away on an inaccessible server.

Now I should continue by saying I can’t stand piracy. I don’t agree with many of the arguments that people throw in defence of doing it: I want to try before I buy; they make enough money as it is; why should I pay £50 for a game; etc etc. Yes, companies make lots of money but there are people like you and me working their guts out on games, books, albums etc and if they don’t sell then those people are out of a job or you don’t get follow-ups.

Unhappy that your favourite television show has been cancelled? Or your favourite indie publisher has shut down? That your favourite band has been dropped from their record label? Well perhaps that’s all because of piracy and we only have ourselves to blame.

So, I don’t like piracy, but equally I don’t like the measures put in place to combat it. DRM in the early days of .mp3 was a pain for genuine purchasers, just as sitting through ‘hate piracy’ adverts in the cinema and on DVDs is annoying. I’ve gone to the cinema / purchased the film stop penalising me for the actions of other people.

The most frustrating thing is that those who want to pirate will get around whatever methods are put in place to stop them so it’s only the genuine consumers at the end of the day that get punished, as shown by the problems based around Sim City.

Piracy is now a fact of life, I’m afraid, and companies like EA should be going after the people who do it not the people who don’t do it or if they have to put in methods like this, at least make them work. I’ve heard nothing but praise for the game and it would normally score 4 or 5 star reviews on Amazon but now because of the DRM fiasco it’s getting 1 and 2 star reviews. It’s the people at Maxis I feel sorry for who have put a lot of hard work into the game only to find fans and games players unable to enjoy their creation.

I hope games publishers take heed of all of this and realise DRM is not the path to go down, at least not in its current form. Let’s tackle the pirates head on but not the genuine consumers and if you are out there downloading films, games, television shows for free without giving something back then don’t be surprised when they stop being made.

I’m going to make a confession. I recently watched all of the Canadian spin-off of Primeval New World via a torrent so I could see it without having to wait the three months for it come over to these shores, so that makes me sound hypocritical. But, I am also re-watching it now on ‘Watch’ and have pre-ordered the DVD. In fact, I upgraded my Virgin package just so I could subscribe to ‘Watch’ to see series five of the original Primeval and the Canadian spin-off so I’ve put my money where my mouth is.

But that’s also a series that won’t be commissioned for a series series because of low-viewing figures, through a mix of them not showing it around the world at the same time or yet in American but also, I bet, because of piracy. Now I’ve supported the series by watching it week-in week-out on television and slapping a digital twenty quid on Amazon’s table for the DVD (I would buy the blu-ray but apparently there isn’t one!) but how many others have not?

I think there is a lot to be said about the actions of television networks and film distributors for the problems. Showing television programmes months after they debut across the pond well after social network spoilers just leads to illegal downloading; just like at films like ‘The Muppets’ and ‘Wreck It Ralph’ which took three months to come to the UK after appearing in the USA. That’s just ridiculous in a world that’s getting smaller when it comes to media consumption. That’s not justifying piracy, but goes someway to explain why some people do it.

So this is a call to games publishers, movie distributors, television networks: stop penalising the genuine fans / consumers and sort yourselves out so problems like this don’t happen in the future!