EA, We Have a Problem

Game Punch: This whole SimCity fiasco has been all over YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, with tales of the terrible always on DRM plaguing the Internet. ‘Always-on-DRM’ is a feature that forces players to play on the online servers, provided by EA (which have been known to go down under high traffic). DRM stands for digital-rights-management, it’s essentially a way for companies to see if their software/games are falling into the hands of pirates or being misused, but also means that paying customers must connect to a server to play their game, servers that have a history of being terrible.

[2pacalypsenow]

This whole mess is a blessing in disguise , people will finally realize we're are not ready for games that require Internet and how DRM is a complete failure , we might get lucky and get a off-line patch

[mistertwoturbo]

Perhaps, we're lucky if other publishers use this as an example in their business meetings of what NOT TO DO.

[HarryMasonHerpderp]

They're just punishing the legit buyers with DRM.
I understand piracy is a problem but this is not the solution.

[mistertwoturbo]

And once the Pirates hack an Offline version, all those legit pissed off people are going to pirate it.

[sjaakiejj]

Except that hacking a game that was made to be played online is non-trivial, and unlikely to happen. A lot of the game's infrastructure is based on the availability of servers, hence why EA didn't just temporarily patch the game to solve the immediate problem.

[Linsolv]

@sjaakiejj - But there ARE built-in features to play on private servers, and that means there are server files, even if they're only available through select distributors.

From there, it's no less trivial than any other cracking to acquire those files, modify them to allow unsigned access, and then block license checks to EA's servers and tell people to connect to cracked servers. Similar to what has been done with CoD4 private servers, for instance.

[aliengmr]

What Ubi did was make the game permanently authenticate to a server, so all that needed to be hacked was a small link, basically. What Diablo 3 and Sim City do is have servers that provide necessary content to run the game. Basically you are buying a client.

By tying content online it makes it pretty much impossible to sever the link externally.

That's how I understand it at least, folks more knowledgeable would be able to explain better.

[MadMen]

EA if you are going to FORCE people to be connected, then have the capacity to back up your regulatory items.

DUMB@$$ES