[btown]

The TechDirt article says this:

> [Developer] Kip's followup was downright laughable. > > "We will allow you to play for as long as we can preserve your game state. This will most likely be minutes."

Everyone seems to hate on the DRM, thinking that it's just a business decision that is not at all integral to gameplay, but they all seem to be forgetting one key thing:

The new SimCity is, at its core, a multiplayer game!

Sure, it's a multiplayer game with the majority of the user experience dedicated to non-social, intra-city interactions. But your city lives within a global economy, and if it's possible to mutate your offline state without mutating your online state, then sync becomes a huge problem.

Consider the server that models a consistent virtual entrepreneur who's moving or visiting from one city to another (which the new AI actually might do, from seeing the videos). Now, say the destination city goes offline for hours. Both the source city and the destination city could end up believing that the virtual entrepreneur is helping their city grow. If the offline time period is short (i.e. the "minutes" that the developer refers to), then the offline city can "snap back" to the correct state much as laggy players see themselves jumping across a map in a shooter. But if it's a long offline period, they could be snapping back in a very visible and jarring way. And it's near impossible to test all of the edge cases unless you can make assumptions about maximum latency before a disconnect.

The developers can only be faulted for not communicating the intricacies of an MMO to their audience well enough. Instead, they allowed their game server to be characterized as a DRM device, and tried to respond to criticisms as if it was just a DRM device.

I want to be able to play Skyrim offline. But I have no qualms about WoW disconnecting me if I go offline for more than a few minutes, or if I tried to log on with a stolen or copied account. I'd expect them to do the same to other players who did so. On that note, we should really just be glad that they're not making SimCity a subscription service!

[wlesieutre]

I think that a lot of people are aware of that; they question whether it actually adds value to the game. Given the choice between an entrepreneur that moves between cities (and other similar features) or a game that works when the internet goes down for 5 minutes, I'd take the latter.

Having interactions like pollution between neighbors is pretty cool. But there's no good reason it couldn't work with AI neighbors too. The online only features feel tacked on to force players into staying online all the time.

[wlesieutre]

Perhaps a more important point that I should have mentioned: I can still play Sim City 2000 (published in 1994). Games like this that depend on online servers for basic functionality? I doubt they'll work in 18 years.