Is simcity faking population ?

[Tramwhet 53]

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9362976.page

 

simcity ui code :

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5133829#file-simcityui-js-L8510

 

 

i don't understand javascript but according to these guys "GetFudgedPopulation" is for faking the population :/

[Zades 7]

I had no idea the UI is coded in javascript, wouldn't be my first choice of language to use (I hate js).  And yes the TOTAL population at the bottom is fake.  This was known through people testing with low wealth, low density buildings and slowly build them up.  The total population number is correct until around 500, after that the game will start adding numbers to the total population.  Your REAL total population is your total works + total shoppers in the detailed view.  Around 100k total population that is actually 10k population.  The amount of extra population added per building increases exponentially with the amount of real population.

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

That's just depressing.

[majortom1981 1]

The SimCity section on reddit has a ton of info . Even a pdf on how the engine works which clears up why we have a ton of traffic problems and jobs problems. 

[warrior 169]

This is now confirmed and fixable: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a8bw7/how_to_mod_sim_city_2013_getting_started_basics/

[macvirt 361]

Apologies, but I find this absolutely hilarious.

 

1. Look at the actual function name.

2. Consider that there actually was a decision to have ghost populations.

3. Consider how it is going to be the job of customers to address the two points above.

4. And offset it all against all the marketing talk. 

 

I'm sorry, but this really is hilarious. I've met my share of crazy things working in this industry, but this is one of total irony.

 

Perhaps EA's marketing should be a bit more careful with throwing stones in a glass box

This is now confirmed and fixable: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a8bw7/how_to_mod_sim_city_2013_getting_started_basics/

 

That thread is amazingly interesting. Not just for the removal traces of terrain editing and such, but also the insight into the shared file structure of the Sims 3. Twisted.

[Sunfighter 186]

We knew that from the jobs figures honestly, we just hoped it was a bug. But yea....it all filters down into the same old problem...the map sizes are too small. Sadly if they just renamed the game to something else, and admitted its a work in progress of a new engine theyd like to eventually use for simcity..and sold it for 39.99...everybody would be alright with all this..but it was the marketing lies that screwed them over.

[highencast 11]

yeah, but I thought SC4 did something like this too

[warrior 169]

It's been known that the package format is the same as that used in the Sims (and Spore, and SC4) since the first beta, only the version number changed but it seems nothing else changed to warrant the version change.

Previous simcity were statiscal based only, so there was never an expectation for the population number to be true, because there wasn't really a true population number. The problem is that the new SC is advertised as everything being simulated, so this fudging shouldn't really be happening according to their marketing...

[macvirt 361]

Well, according to all the marketing there is no fudging.

 

 

You know, what baffles me is that they could easily have prevented this. Fudging is not uncommon to game elements. What I would have loved to see, is an approach of expanding the game capabilities from the get go. Here's what we're going to get to be busy with, this is the agent system, this is where we want to take it to, here are the targets and steps, this is where user created content and modding comes in, and so forth. I am simplifying ofcourse, but it just baffles me. It's not rocket science, marketing. They could easily have turned this in to a very interesting synergy between customers and a studio taking care of a game and the enjoyment by customers, complete with microtransactions along the way. 

 

But I guess that's beyond EA.

[BravoGreenONE 120]

Its good that the agents are not 1:1. It gives them no excuse to not increase map sizes. All they have to do is adjust ratios and capacities

[michal27278 68]

Well, according to all the marketing there is no fudging.

 

 

You know, what baffles me is that they could easily have prevented this. Fudging is not uncommon to game elements. What I would have loved to see, is an approach of expanding the game capabilities from the get go. Here's what we're going to get to be busy with, this is the agent system, this is where we want to take it to, here are the targets and steps, this is where user created content and modding comes in, and so forth. I am simplifying ofcourse, but it just baffles me. It's not rocket science, marketing. They could easily have turned this in to a very interesting synergy between customers and a studio taking care of a game and the enjoyment by customers, complete with microtransactions along the way. 

 

But I guess that's beyond EA.

 

I strongly believe in following statements from reddit:

 

"How did it come to this? It’s been speculated that perhaps those who pushed for publication at EA considered the customers so stupid that they wouldn’t notice. While it’s abundantly evident that the EA executives think very little of their customers, I suspect the truth is much more sinister. It wasn’t a matter how whether they would be found out, but whether they could maintain the façade for a week. After all, that is when most sales would be made."

 

article continues on: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a75te/how_it_came_to_this/

[Linoa06 1,374]

I'm fine with this.

 

If we used that on Cities in Motion, we would have 400'000 inhabitant cities represented by 400'000 people, not 65'000.

 

Do notice that if you have 400k agents on a map on either game, it'd prove impractical and laggy (and you'd get a 500mx500m tile in Simcity so the game doesn't crash because it's lost in calculations.)

 

Plus imagine crappy traffic AI + tons of cars in streets.

[Camlon 50]

I'm fine with this.

 

If we used that on Cities in Motion, we would have 400'000 inhabitant cities represented by 400'000 people, not 65'000.

 

Do notice that if you have 400k agents on a map on either game, it'd prove impractical and laggy (and you'd get a 500mx500m tile in Simcity so the game doesn't crash because it's lost in calculations.)

 

Plus imagine crappy traffic AI + tons of cars in streets.

Problem is that they are inflating their population. Each house has 4 agents. If a agent represent 8.5 people, then each house has 34 people. Thats not very realistic. 

 

Why can't they just use a realistic population estimate. 

[macvirt 361]

 

 

Well, according to all the marketing there is no fudging.

 

 

You know, what baffles me is that they could easily have prevented this. Fudging is not uncommon to game elements. What I would have loved to see, is an approach of expanding the game capabilities from the get go. Here's what we're going to get to be busy with, this is the agent system, this is where we want to take it to, here are the targets and steps, this is where user created content and modding comes in, and so forth. I am simplifying ofcourse, but it just baffles me. It's not rocket science, marketing. They could easily have turned this in to a very interesting synergy between customers and a studio taking care of a game and the enjoyment by customers, complete with microtransactions along the way. 

 

But I guess that's beyond EA.

 

I strongly believe in following statements from reddit:

 

"How did it come to this? It’s been speculated that perhaps those who pushed for publication at EA considered the customers so stupid that they wouldn’t notice. While it’s abundantly evident that the EA executives think very little of their customers, I suspect the truth is much more sinister. It wasn’t a matter how whether they would be found out, but whether they could maintain the façade for a week. After all, that is when most sales would be made."

 

article continues on: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a75te/how_it_came_to_this/

 

I have to admit I have worked for EA on several occasions as a consultant in the past, primarily in relation to investment rounds, but also other publishing houses and studios in our industries. I tend to approach these matters from my professional background, and less from my own "gamer" perspective.  

 

One thing to realise is that there is a strong and mostly natural blindness from people who work in the trenches towards the perspectives of customers. There is a lot of research available, but very often it is very easy to get lost in perspective management. 

 

One of the biggest issues is where the management level confuses the difference between what they want, and what the customer wants. That is common. It can get complicated though when the staff don't really work for their own strategic targets, but for those of a publisher, because that adds a decision level completely seperate from much of the resource allocations and research on the "studio" levels.

 

The executive minions, so to speak, who really have very little focus on gaming or game design (it is an industry) have a very similar issue of confusing perspectives, but it is more abstract than that of confusing perspectives. It is about targets, and when an enterprise goes from one round of investments to the next, it is sadly all too natural for the vision and focus to become much more short term than long term. There will be strategic long term objectives, but the cycle becomes a chain of short term dependancies. 

 

As in the high finance industry, the (again) sadly all too natural result is that in the business management modelling customers become resources. Just like developers, designers, artists, entire studios and even various property rights. All elements in service of the enterprise management's targets become resources. 

 

And from that point on, it is incredibly easy to forget the basics of economics. To name one thing, there is no economic interaction that does not have its basis in trust. And as the perceptions change, and all elements become resources, trust changes from a basic requirement to a mere variable, a coin to spend, and waste. Particularly because in the mindset that follows, trust is not that foundation or any sort of target, it is a variable. One which instruments can wield and put to use. The same way as other variables. This is one of the biggest reasons why marketing tends to serve the short term cycle management (sales burst management) and not strategic goals. 

 

In a general sense, it is a conflict of the mind between working to concentrate wealth and generating wealth. But other concepts can be substituted there as well, think of for example brand value. 

 

Either way, with the customer having become a strict resource element in our industry, we do have to admit that in many places the divide between the actual work and the ultimate decision level has grown to be as large as the divide between the enterprise and its customer. Only natural, as both are .. resources. Developers have pride in their work, they feel working in the industry is awesome, and corporate culture design is tailored to ensure that those in the trenches do not realise that  they are mere resources, just like the customers. Customers are even easier, entire fields of the sciences of marketing and other parts of the human sciences have been dedicated to this since the dawn of currency.

 

What many consumers, or rather most, do not realise is that a) this is an industry, it is no different from - for example - the banking industry and b) it is managed as such. There are indie studios and developers making games in a shed still, but the industry stands mostly seperate from that. The industry is a sector divided between publishers and investment firms. 

 

EA is far from the only one to operate exactly as they should in this industry. That consumers sometimes take issue with that is only natural, and often enough a direct result of perceived but at times also real disdain for consumers, but I have to be honest, this industry can operate as it does exactly because of consumer behaviour. 

 

What that person on reddit called the "facade" is nothing more than common business and venture management. It is done in these ways because consumers abide by it. Look at the trends in preordering releases, look at the trends in dividing title specification in shell release and microtransaction releases, and so forth. 

 

There's no need for paranoia or anything like that. Nor any need for elaborate deconstructing differences in statements between developers and strategists. This is an industry people. It operates because your buying behaviour enables it. Simple as that. 

 

 

Marketing is sales. Pure and simple. It is not about truth, or your trust. It is about managing your behaviour of buying. That is why the bigger houses in our industry are investing so much in profiling and data mining, because right now it is an art, but the research itself is worth a pretty penny and the ultimate targets it enables are worth far more than mere AAA titles. DRM in that topic has nothing to do anymore with piracy, we use that kind of argumentation only at conferences and investor briefs (and the odd review site with a special relationship), the transition towards online play is far less an instrument against piracy (we do realise that we punish people who do not pirate, we readily admit that at GDC conventions and in Vegas) but far more with those targets of profiling (and a bit of simple distribution management, ofcourse). 

 

For those who have taken issue(s), there are a few simple lessons to learn from all this:

1. Never believe any information from review media, studios and publishers. All is marketing. Marketing is sales. 

2. Never preorder a title. You are giving trust without it being earned.

3. Make up your own mind by finding a place where peer gamers exchange information without falling for the designed fanboy stimuli. 

4. Realise that you do not own the games you buy from big publishers. Check for the terms. If that is an issue, buy other games. 

5. Form communities, don't be sheep. You are sheep to the money already, if you do not like that, do not behave like it.

 

And as a side comment, keep in mind that there may be differences between your expectations and what a game is designed to deliver. This is of severe importance for franchise titles. That you loved one title in a franchise does not mean that you can approach a next title as a next version of it. It will be designed in a different time, for a different audience as the previous title, and above all it will be funded for dfferent market targets. Find out if it fits you, and only then buy it. That prevents disappointments. 

 

Above all, do not give trust without it being earned. Pure and simple. If you are treated as a resource because of a mentality that follows from the approach of investment management, apply the same approach in reverse. We treat your trust as a coin. We spend it, not you. We do not need a foundation of trust as long as you give trust without thinking. If you do not like that, reverse it. Do not spend until you are willing to spend your trust. Just be aware that as long as a minority of you does that, there will be more followers than leaders, pun intended.

 

SC2013 is not a bad venture. On the contrary. It is very rewarding. It also is not a bad game. It is tailored well, it is just tailored to a different market for different behaviour and for different purposes than what the marketing told you. It is quite well done for these different targets really. But if it is not for you, so be it, take the lessons and apply them - or not. 

 

[michal27278 68]

^Very well written. 

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

Seems that the "SimCity" players are the wrong ones to mess with. Someone should've figured this out. We had ten years of digging into the guts of SC4. What made them think some of this genre of players would not take a look under the hood and find these things out?

 

Marketing realities etc. etc. I don't and never will buy it. The fundamental truth is people want to play fun games....period. A company should have respectable customer service. The end product is for the guy who wants to have a good time in the comfort of his home in his/her free time. The true value is not about a company's business practices. It seems the point of the developer and customer relationship is sacrificed for people who could care less about what they are selling. And lying to people for profit is NOT ok or acceptable in any way. That's like saying "people lie to each other all the time, no need to get mad, get over it....it's just reality". Though it may be something that happens, it does not make it ok and we should not give up on demanding better for ourselves.

[Linoa06 1,374]

I'm fine with this.

 

If we used that on Cities in Motion, we would have 400'000 inhabitant cities represented by 400'000 people, not 65'000.

 

Do notice that if you have 400k agents on a map on either game, it'd prove impractical and laggy (and you'd get a 500mx500m tile in Simcity so the game doesn't crash because it's lost in calculations.)

 

Plus imagine crappy traffic AI + tons of cars in streets.

Problem is that they are inflating their population. Each house has 4 agents. If a agent represent 8.5 people, then each house has 34 people. Thats not very realistic. 

 

Why can't they just use a realistic population estimate. 

 

Simcity 4 also suffers from this problem.

 

Also, this piece of Reddit news is written with unfair remarks and out of context criticism. It also jumps to conclusions too quickly. Not every critic has to be positive, but it has to be fair and this article is ANYTHING but fair. Hidden and lower population? How do you want the system to work without jamming up. And then you take stuff out of context, like the server calculations. We also see beautiful slurs dotting the text, which just shows how desperate our writer is to show his feelings. We have words taken out of context and used wrongly, we have very haughty, negative and somewhat irrelevant terms -  "the Maxis dynasty" or "zombies" - and most of all, biased is an euphemism when it comes to describing this essay. It's as if it were trying to make you feel bad, and its wording tries to in fact when it speaks about people forgiving the DRM.

 

What do you want, though. It's Reddit.

[macvirt 361]

Seems that the "SimCity" players are the wrong ones to mess with. Someone should've figured this out. We had ten years of digging into the guts of SC4. What made them think some of this genre of players would not take a look under the hood and find these things out?

 

Marketing realities etc. etc. I don't and never will buy it. The fundamental truth is people want to play fun games....period. A company should have respectable customer service. The end product is for the guy who wants to have a good time in the comfort of his home in his/her free time. The true value is not about a company's business practices. It seems the point of the developer and customer relationship is sacrificed for people who could care less about what they are selling. And lying to people for profit is NOT ok.

 

SC4 players of the user types who nurtured SC4 in to what it has become are honestly just not the target user types for SC2013. It is a reboot product, you only need so called core user types to generate messaging, "buzz" if you will. Because they come with communities attached, and are very likely to fall for the trap of "I want to believe" and thus easy to influence towards generating exposure beyond their communities. 

 

I have to be honest though, the part of "not to mess with" is a calculated element. In support of sales. Why do you think is there so much emphasis in messaging on creating divide between believers and people who ask questions. It is productive to have a dissenting element, because those can be classed as "haters" and thus be ignored in the presentations and briefings. To be even more blunt, the less of such user types present as customers in future releases the easier it is to reach established targets on the more accessible (and cheaper) volume markets of casual and leisure play.

 

This "I want to believe" phenomenon is very human. There is nothing wrong with it. Just realise that for marketing and business development it is very easy to use, and often the difference between "use" and "abuse" becomes very small. That is by design, it is part of instrumentation.

 

I understand that lying for profit is not ok. I agree with it from a moral standpoint. As I commented elsewhere, there are a lot of simpler, more cost effective and more productive instruments and targets available for the marketing to come to a much healthier trust and commercial relationship between the involved parties. But that is just not interesting as long as people simply follow. 

 

Fact of the matter is, this is not something unique to the gaming industry. This is an integral part of our society. To such a degree that most sectors of our economy, politics, even cultural elements are so strongly believed to be unable to function without lying for profit that it has become a structural dependancy for the functioning of our systems.

 

We all have to make our own decisions in this, I do not like the situation but I cannot deny it.

 

But again, it is always a personal and individual decision, SC2013 is well tailored for today's volume markets, its game design matches very well the targets set, and it follows the focus of function follows form very well. If it is not for you, that is fine. Personal choices. 

[Camlon 50]

Simcity 4 also suffers from this problem and nobody seemed to whine. You're letting your contempt for Simcity 5 get ahead of you. 

Yes, but not to the same degree. In general in Sim CIty 4 a house contains about 7 - 14 people. And in my experience all apartment blocks contain double of what they really should contain. 

 

But at least Sim City 4 has a linear system. In Sim City 2013 they are actively trying to inflate the numbers by having an exponential system. In the begining each house contain 5 people, but then in later game each house contain 34 people. Its silly.

 

I see the faults in Sim City 4 as well. For instance one fault that does not get mention a lot (traffic get mentioned a lot) is how people move into the city. In Sim City 4 they move in if their desirability is high and the RCI is high. But in real life, they also consider how close their job is to their work. Because of this we get the annoying problem where they create huge R$$$ buildings and then it drops down to R$$ due to lack of jobs.

 

Also, this piece of Reddit news is written with unfair remarks and out of context criticism. It also jumps to conclusions too quickly. Not every critic has to be positive, but it has to be fair and this article is ANYTHING but fair. Hidden and lower population? How do you want the system to work without jamming up. And then you take stuff out of context, like the server calculations. We also see beautiful slurs dotting the text, which just shows how desperate our writer is to show his feelings. We have words taken out of context and used wrongly, we have very haughty, negative and somewhat irrelevant terms -  "the Maxis dynasty" or "zombies" - and most of all, biased is an euphemism when it comes to describing this essay. It's as if it were trying to make you feel bad, and its wording tries to in fact when it speaks about people forgiving the DRM.

I just want them to show the actual population. Not trying to inflate the numbers, so people will think the cities are larger. I actually noticed this before I read the code. I saw a city that contained 900K people, but by my estimation it only had 5000 apartments. Realistically that city should have 20K people. In Sim City 4 it might have 50K people, but not 900K.

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

Yes, SimCity 4 had slightly unrealistically high amounts of residents in its buildings.  But there is a mod available that fixes that.

 

And it certainly did not do this crap:

 

The amount of extra population added per building increases exponentially with the amount of real population.

[PieceOfMind 3]

Hey guys, I'm new here, but thought I'd share this graph with you.  Fairly self explanatory...  I just find it easier to visualise this way.

 

[Marla_Singer 46]

I'm quitte fascinated by the argument saying: "this game is a reboot, it's not aimed to please the existing simcity community but actually a much larger audience".

To me, it's a bit as if someone would say that GTA IV focuses too much on a male audience and thus loses the 50% of the female audience. As such, let's turn it into a socializing games focusing in getting friends on line and interacting a bit as in the sims. That's just killing the cash cow to me.

A city builder should be meant to build cities. That's what made Maxis sold millions of copies in the past. Trying to make it something different won't make it a more mainstream product, it can only denature it.

[DmainEvent 195]

Good grief... How the hell did you get your hands on the UI code of simcity?  I better copy and paste before somebody finds out and pulls it off the web...

All we need now is the code that runs behind glass-box...

 

Then we would be cooking.  

[Linoa06 1,374]

I'm quitte fascinated by the argument saying: "this game is a reboot, it's not aimed to please the existing simcity community but actually a much larger audience".

To me, it's a bit as if someone would say that GTA IV focuses too much on a male audience and thus loses the 50% of the female audience. As such, let's turn it into a socializing games focusing in getting friends on line and interacting a bit as in the sims. That's just killing the cash cow to me.

A city builder should be meant to build cities. That's what made Maxis sold millions of copies in the past. Trying to make it something different won't make it a more mainstream product, it can only denature it.

 

I'm a female and I like my GTA IV with blood everywhere.

 

But I get you, EA would probably turn it into a stereotypically "female" game (i call that workless games, or bored in the office games,but eh). Blizzard would just make more WoW updates, though. Remember 60% of the WoW playerbase is female (and not "plays as one").

[Frode789 70]

Hey guys, I'm new here, but thought I'd share this graph with you.  Fairly self explanatory...  I just find it easier to visualise this way.

 

 

haha, Sim"city" with 200 000 actually being 25k

[elektrichead22 10]

 

 

Well, according to all the marketing there is no fudging.

 

 

You know, what baffles me is that they could easily have prevented this. Fudging is not uncommon to game elements. What I would have loved to see, is an approach of expanding the game capabilities from the get go. Here's what we're going to get to be busy with, this is the agent system, this is where we want to take it to, here are the targets and steps, this is where user created content and modding comes in, and so forth. I am simplifying ofcourse, but it just baffles me. It's not rocket science, marketing. They could easily have turned this in to a very interesting synergy between customers and a studio taking care of a game and the enjoyment by customers, complete with microtransactions along the way. 

 

But I guess that's beyond EA.

 

>I strongly believe in following statements from reddit:

 

"How did it come to this? It’s been speculated that perhaps those who pushed for publication at EA considered the customers so stupid that they wouldn’t notice. While it’s abundantly evident that the EA executives think very little of their customers, I suspect the truth is much more sinister. It wasn’t a matter how whether they would be found out, but whether they could maintain the façade for a week. After all, that is when most sales would be made."

 

article continues on: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a75te/how_it_came_to_this/

 

I have to admit I have worked for EA on several occasions as a consultant in the past, primarily in relation to investment rounds, but also other publishing houses and studios in our industries. I tend to approach these matters from my professional background, and less from my own "gamer" perspective.  

 

One thing to realise is that there is a strong and mostly natural blindness from people who work in the trenches towards the perspectives of customers. There is a lot of research available, but very often it is very easy to get lost in perspective management. 

 

One of the biggest issues is where the management level confuses the difference between what they want, and what the customer wants. That is common. It can get complicated though when the staff don't really work for their own strategic targets, but for those of a publisher, because that adds a decision level completely seperate from much of the resource allocations and research on the "studio" levels.

 

The executive minions, so to speak, who really have very little focus on gaming or game design (it is an industry) have a very similar issue of confusing perspectives, but it is more abstract than that of confusing perspectives. It is about targets, and when an enterprise goes from one round of investments to the next, it is sadly all too natural for the vision and focus to become much more short term than long term. There will be strategic long term objectives, but the cycle becomes a chain of short term dependancies. 

 

As in the high finance industry, the (again) sadly all too natural result is that in the business management modelling customers become resources. Just like developers, designers, artists, entire studios and even various property rights. All elements in service of the enterprise management's targets become resources. 

 

And from that point on, it is incredibly easy to forget the basics of economics. To name one thing, there is no economic interaction that does not have its basis in trust. And as the perceptions change, and all elements become resources, trust changes from a basic requirement to a mere variable, a coin to spend, and waste. Particularly because in the mindset that follows, trust is not that foundation or any sort of target, it is a variable. One which instruments can wield and put to use. The same way as other variables. This is one of the biggest reasons why marketing tends to serve the short term cycle management (sales burst management) and not strategic goals. 

 

In a general sense, it is a conflict of the mind between working to concentrate wealth and generating wealth. But other concepts can be substituted there as well, think of for example brand value. 

 

Either way, with the customer having become a strict resource element in our industry, we do have to admit that in many places the divide between the actual work and the ultimate decision level has grown to be as large as the divide between the enterprise and its customer. Only natural, as both are .. resources. Developers have pride in their work, they feel working in the industry is awesome, and corporate culture design is tailored to ensure that those in the trenches do not realise that  they are mere resources, just like the customers. Customers are even easier, entire fields of the sciences of marketing and other parts of the human sciences have been dedicated to this since the dawn of currency.

 

What many consumers, or rather most, do not realise is that a) this is an industry, it is no different from - for example - the banking industry and b) it is managed as such. There are indie studios and developers making games in a shed still, but the industry stands mostly seperate from that. The industry is a sector divided between publishers and investment firms. 

 

EA is far from the only one to operate exactly as they should in this industry. That consumers sometimes take issue with that is only natural, and often enough a direct result of perceived but at times also real disdain for consumers, but I have to be honest, this industry can operate as it does exactly because of consumer behaviour. 

 

What that person on reddit called the "facade" is nothing more than common business and venture management. It is done in these ways because consumers abide by it. Look at the trends in preordering releases, look at the trends in dividing title specification in shell release and microtransaction releases, and so forth. 

 

There's no need for paranoia or anything like that. Nor any need for elaborate deconstructing differences in statements between developers and strategists. This is an industry people. It operates because your buying behaviour enables it. Simple as that. 

 

 

Marketing is sales. Pure and simple. It is not about truth, or your trust. It is about managing your behaviour of buying. That is why the bigger houses in our industry are investing so much in profiling and data mining, because right now it is an art, but the research itself is worth a pretty penny and the ultimate targets it enables are worth far more than mere AAA titles. DRM in that topic has nothing to do anymore with piracy, we use that kind of argumentation only at conferences and investor briefs (and the odd review site with a special relationship), the transition towards online play is far less an instrument against piracy (we do realise that we punish people who do not pirate, we readily admit that at GDC conventions and in Vegas) but far more with those targets of profiling (and a bit of simple distribution management, ofcourse). 

 

For those who have taken issue(s), there are a few simple lessons to learn from all this:

1. Never believe any information from review media, studios and publishers. All is marketing. Marketing is sales. 

2. Never preorder a title. You are giving trust without it being earned.

3. Make up your own mind by finding a place where peer gamers exchange information without falling for the designed fanboy stimuli. 

4. Realise that you do not own the games you buy from big publishers. Check for the terms. If that is an issue, buy other games. 

5. Form communities, don't be sheep. You are sheep to the money already, if you do not like that, do not behave like it.

 

And as a side comment, keep in mind that there may be differences between your expectations and what a game is designed to deliver. This is of severe importance for franchise titles. That you loved one title in a franchise does not mean that you can approach a next title as a next version of it. It will be designed in a different time, for a different audience as the previous title, and above all it will be funded for dfferent market targets. Find out if it fits you, and only then buy it. That prevents disappointments. 

 

Above all, do not give trust without it being earned. Pure and simple. If you are treated as a resource because of a mentality that follows from the approach of investment management, apply the same approach in reverse. We treat your trust as a coin. We spend it, not you. We do not need a foundation of trust as long as you give trust without thinking. If you do not like that, reverse it. Do not spend until you are willing to spend your trust. Just be aware that as long as a minority of you does that, there will be more followers than leaders, pun intended.

 

SC2013 is not a bad venture. On the contrary. It is very rewarding. It also is not a bad game. It is tailored well, it is just tailored to a different market for different behaviour and for different purposes than what the marketing told you. It is quite well done for these different targets really. But if it is not for you, so be it, take the lessons and apply them - or not. 

 

 

if we all listened to this they we would all be playing farmville on facebook and paying for it under the name simcity,,,,

 

let's state facts for what their worth... MAXIS not EA for the maxis defenders... inflated the pop so the player would feel a sense of worth with the small sized maps. playing on our eagerness to pay 50 dollars in six months to get the privelage to expand and build an even higher population.... After the sims 2 and sims 3 they look at us as jokes waiting to throw 60 dollars away every 4 to six months and that is all.... if the pop was normal then they would loose a percentage of customers and that is that. 

[YukiEiriKun 29]

4. Realise that you do not own the games you buy from big publishers. Check for the terms. If that is an issue, buy other games.

 

 

I'm fairly certain that in EU there is legistlation that overcomes those EULA's.

And I'm sure, that EU supreme court ruled, that when you purchase even a lisence for a software, you become owner of that lisence and thus are allowed to sell it if you don't need it.

[macvirt 361]

Correct, for citizens of the EU it is a very different situation. That said, it currently still differs a bit between member states. EU Directives are compulsory to be internalised on a member state level, but in accordance also to local legislation. I've taken the liberty of doing some checking here in Brussels, and while the various terms & conditions of EA are not compliant, there currently is no case as of yet as no case has been brought before the EC courts. There are ways for member state goverments to do that, but also for citizen initiatives. Sadly the capacity of the relevant directorate is rather taxed currently by dealings with issues from other commercial sectors, so it will be a while before it could become a topic.

 

That said, neither Apple nor Microsoft ever expected to actually find themselves under scrutiny, because they are not used to that back home. The EU is an interesting place in these matters, very different from affairs back home. 

[morriswalters 16]

Just as a counterpoint.  While I could care less about EA and what they say, there are no little sims.  No little people running around.  The population stats that count are displayed in the population panel and they aren't inflated.  How many of which class employed and how many shoppers.  And since these are the ones that count I could care less that there are no baby rug rats and sim moms cluttering up the landscape.  CXL had a atrocious population inflation and people just loved to cram as many as they could on a map.  They had contests about it.  If stats are what is important to you than play a spreadsheet.  If the game stinks don't buy it.