Pouria

You know what... I'm thinking this game is actually not that bad if we were to call it simcity online. But many of us just expected it to be simcity 5. This simply isn't a game that takes the core of simcity 4 and tries to improve on it (oh, I wish so much they just did that). Maybe they shouldn't have called it simcity at all, because whatever this is, it isn't a true successor to the original simcity series. Yeah, the game isn't so bad to deserve an average score of 2/10 in metacritic or 1.5 stars in amazon. It's just that people's expectation of simcity was different and obvious obstacles like the always online DRM and tiny city lots made them rage to give 0/10 in many cases. IMHO this game deserves 6 or even 7 out of 10 if I can pretend this isn't simcity that I'm playing.

Well, my point is that piracy doesn't really hurt developers/publishers as much as they think or say it does. It's impossible to give exact numbers on this but I'm willing to bet that at least 95% of people who pirate a game wouldn't buy a game even if they couldn't pirate it. They might not even like the game. They pirate it because they can and pirating is free. DRM, even if it makes it impossible for pirates to access the game will only hurt the sales of a game. Ubisoft learned this the hard way when their sales on PC dropped significantly. Even Blizzard acknowledged their mistake with diablo 3. And yet EA is now making the same mistake. Unbelievable!!!

Well, here is my take on the game having only played the beta so far. The tiles are too small and that is a huge issue for me. I'm used to playing on the large tiles in simcity 4 and would have actually liked to try even larger tiles. Curvy roads are a good addition but because of tile size issue, you really don't want to use them. It seems to me that traffic is exaggerated in the game (by a factor of 10x or more!). I can't understand why in a town with 5k population, I should see so many cars on the streets causing a pretty bad traffic. Actually I don't understand why sims use cars at all! Always-on DRM is a great concern for me especially after seeing the launch issues. I can neither trust my own connection nor EA's servers. I don't understand why they're talking so much about specialization as a new feature. I used to specialize my cities in simcity 4 too! It's no excuse for making city tiles smaller. I like the new bus transit simulation but where is the subway? oh, I forgot subway makes no sense when your city is so tiny I seem to have a much easier time making a profit in this game than I did with simcity 4. Is it just for beta? Other than that, game actually looks to be fun... But I don't think the fun would last for more than a few hours because you can fill up your cities so fast! I want to play the game, but I think it's not worth $80 (Australia's price). I think I would wait and see how much its price would drop in the next 6 months. EA may shut down the servers few years after launch but this is really not the kind of game I would play years after its launch anyway. I might have some fun with it for a weeks or months, but in the end I will go back to simcity 4 unless this game gets major improvements.

Pretty much every game that I actually enjoyed playing on PC had good sales too. It just seems to me that piracy has become an excuse for developers to justify why their crappy console ported game couldn't sell so well on PC. Also unlike console gamers, PC gamers are willing to stick to their old games unless their modern alternatives are actually better (reason why so many players still play simcity 4 and simcity 3000).

Not everyone is blessed to live in a country with decent paychecks and to afford 80 euros for a game. No they do not, I live on social security and still managed to put the money aside to buy it legally. Being dishonest just because you are poor does not make it right. Well, let's face it... Many people especially in the third world countries can barely afford to pay for their basic needs. To them, paying $400 for computer (which they gonna use for lots of things more important than gaming) is already a major investment. So I really don't blame them for pirating. In the end if they couldn't get a pirated copy for free (or a very low price), they would simply do without it. So it's not going to be a loss for developers/publishers either