macvirt

I don't compare it at all. Entirely different beasts, from entirely different times & circumstances, for entirely different markets and targets.

Something that popped up a while ago, but with it popping back to mind after diving in again a bit. The absence of manual saving and the probable necessity of an undo function. As we know, there is no manual save functionality. There is no quick & easy reverting to a previous version specific to your actions, for example when making placements or working along the density lines to foster density and growth. If you make a mistake, want to make a quick correction or find out you've been roleplaying a mad architect you can't switch back. Well you can, but the timing is incredibly critical due to the automated server side saving. Corrections on a strategic level are not possible, and limited on the tactical or detail level as well. Am I the only one who still misses the manual save option? Or as an alternative, a common undo option. Sure, it is possible within the game timeline solve mistakes in realtime, but it is a game after all. It's rather common and simplistic functionality.

If only it were a beta But no, the point here is not stress testing. There's a bit of that, because practical scenario testing is always slightly different than the network level testing. But really this is just marketing, it's packaged and presented with the "beta" flag with a variety of popular terms so people are less inclined to punch through the realities of this industry as customers.

I found it funny how emergency services have to abide by traffic lights.

Don't put words in my mouth. I am not comparing a beta to DLC. Please read more carefully than that. What used to be the concept of beta testing has changed in our industry. We have seen the use and benefit of using the concept as part of our marketing. This should not come as a suprise, this has been a growing trend for years. It allows us to use our customers for purpose of marketing and sales. It is immensely beneficial, lowers costs and gives us a reach which we ourselves would have certain issues with in terms of cost but also timing. So, we call a demo round a beta. It lets people think it is a beta, but it is not. It is fine, because this rests on utilising behavioral stimuli as part of marketing and sales. People for example want to contribute something, they feel valued when they have a "report". People scrounge for access, because a selective means of access ties in with making people feel special. And so forth. Anyone with a modicum of schooling in business management, advertising, marketing can explain how these things have evolved. This is not excempt even to the games industry. The telecom markets for example with fiber initiatives for consumption markets use the same methods. Similarly, we have learned that it is less interesting financially to release a complete product. It is more rewarding to, from design specifications and targets, release a working but shell product to which we add services and integrated followup products that fill in that discrepancy between design and target specs and the created packaged release. This is where DLC comes in. This is what increasingly is more rewarding even than just the revenue cycle of the main release. Look, I realise you want to see it as a beta. That is fine. Honestly, just please don't expect others to not simply accept marketing as reality.

2PM EST, if I caught that correctly, for reopening.

Sorry, but that is obsolete thinking these days. Think about it, games are on purpose not releases as full games. More revenue can be achieved by means of stripping elements from a release with the focus on revenue streams following up after release. Does the word DLC ring a bell? Consider even just the practical case of "we have a design specification for features and content, we would love to do X and Y, we wanted to do X and Y, but we ran out of resources allocated (which includes the factor time)". A few months later that shows up for a price. This is the discrepancy between the marketing and the economics, but it is the reality. Definitions have changed, because the industry has changed, because the economics have changed. It is that simple. Whether that is a bad thing is completely subjective. I work in this industry, for me it is not a bad thing at all. Cheaper development, less hassle, more revenue streams.

No, this is the new format of demo constructs. Integral part of marketing planning. It is just called a "beta" to make potential customers scrounge for access and create buzz while doing so. It's a demo. It is not even a stress test As posted elsewhere, there is a growing interest in our industry for this remarkable correlation between assigning limited resources for demo rounds and increase of sales in mass consumption markets of leisure and casual play categories - because people follow the buzz. Regardless of whether the buzz is positive or negative.

Wake up, this has been a trend in the industry for quite a bit now. This is the new demo construct, it serves that and marketing and sales this way. It is not a beta. It is not even a stress test. If it even were just that, these things would not be allocated resources on a basis of zero sum planning. Last year there was a fun bit of research on that presented in GDMag on the correlation between how hard people whine and shout when servers go down during such marketing stages and the actual increases in sales on mass consumption markets. Any other notion is understandable, but it is part of a "I want to believe and buy to believe" symptom. Not reality. That does not diminish the game by the way. I just wish would approach SC2013 more with a fresh mind, and not one coming from SC4. Times have changed, core users are commercially uninteresting, casual gaming is the trend, this is not the next version of SC4 and it was designed not to be that. Deliberately, because this is business.

A bit of irony there, but if the NAM team were to find a way to create such circular transit constructions pretty much most of the "new" functionality of the (comparatively more limited than SC4) transit networking would fall away.

Marketing. Let's just be honest. This is a demo construct element part of the product marketing. A beta is something completely different. Calling a mosquito an elephant and making a powerpoint presentation about it along with posters and stickers everywhere still does not make it an elephant. It is not like this is new. This has been a growing development in our industry. Think about it, it makes perfect commercial sense. Less pesky customer interactions in private rounds, cheaper costs for the planning and resources allocation for such demo ventures (not to mention you do not have to release packaged code which people could use to reconstruct missing parts of the full release) and so forth. And as a bonus, everybody talks about it everywhere and hunts for keys and shouts on social media. This is marketing. There are no mistakes. This is just zero sum planning. Nothing more is needed. The masses of casual and leisure type users will buy it anyway, and then a student loan's worth of DLC Come on folks, get over it. This is not designed to cater to people with an immersive or realism focus in simulation games. This is business people. It makes much more money than catering to more select or even niche segments of markets.

Apologies, but that is just the marketing. The reality, something EA themselves presented last year at GDC, is that these methods are part of an evolving strategy of user profiling research and anti piracy. A strategy then translated into directives for the studios and their development of titles. The rest is just marketing. There are no technical requirements or such which limit development according to these lines, or even for these lines. These are choices, they just originate in a completely different level than what used to be game design. The games industry is first and foremost business. Customers are resources. There are exceptions to that approach, absolutely. But the EA conglomerate is not such an exception. On the contrary, it is leading in ventures like these. Because this is what pays for them.

I prefer to look at such an expansion as being to this SimCity what SC3000 was to SC2000. A polishing of the basic gameplay, plus shinier graphics and bigger maps. Polishing gameplay? Graphics? Maps? That's not an expansion pack at all. I'd be devastated if EA released an Asian themed city; then threw in an extra tram/trolley car with elevated roads and called it an expansion. I agree with what someone else here said, it is disgusting that EA charges $20 for bedroom sets in The Sims3. Who is buying these? Who is encouraging the developers to make that junk?? Ofcourse those are roads to follow for DLC content. Don't expect a full game please. That is no longer how it works. There are masses of people with just a few hours worth of passive amusement focus (usually with the added on parts of social shouting). There are less people who actually want a deeper or even proper experience. This is business.

I have no problems with that. The city grants a concession to a bus company. The bus company analizes traffic and designs the routes and schedules...it's not a public transport tycoon game...the only issue might be...is the in-game analysis any good? No, it is utterly lacking in depth and insight. But really, this is presented as a city building simulator. How hard is it to consider that people want to replicate the experience of that to the detail level for the immersion of their chosing. When I first found out they had gotten rid of the "pesky" underground stuff I was a bit peeved, but even busses? Come on. This sort of SimSocieties level of cutting out such elements is starting to remind me of the drama of Firaxis cutting out core components like religion and such from Civ V Don't get me wrong, there are masses of people who like it this way, a more passive amusement focused way. That is fine. It's just not for me. In these days of grand speeches of how PC gaming is not dead I would have expected them to not take the easy way out and made a complete game - but yeah, I know, in our industry it is not longer about the game. It is about the revenue streams after giving out an expensive shell of a game

Any company worth it's weight would have invested in planning and resources for stress testing prior to releasing a demo and calling it a "beta".

The other way around more likely. It's got a wider perspective, but has lost depth. Both in features and in content. But as mentioned before, that is why DLC was invented. To buy the full game But honestly, you find it challenging?

That would be rather silly. Considering how strategic DLC tracks are today it would thoroughly surprise me if such things had not been provided their own planning cycle. It's an EA studio, EA has a very specific strategy on these things, something it always puts in directives. Maybe they think they have some marketing maneuvering room for this or that little detail choice, but what was once moddability today is the territory of DLC first. There is no ad hoc winging that. Any interaction with the user level is just marketing.

So I needed a bus. Turns out I need not worry about traffic or analysis or anything. Just turn that on, and bus stops are automagically placed. *facepalm*

Moddability is a concept which in the eyes of publishers is a cheap means of perpetuating a product past its support lifecycle. So, do we still not have more tangible information into whether the toolsets will be online or offline, or what licensing requirements there are going to be, or what things people will not be able to create in order to not compete with content or functionality created by the studio itself? Remarkable. And this while such a big component of the marketing was to attract the SC4 users who still play exactly because of moddability

The user feedback in the followups to that interview is a bit of a confrontation with the marketing to be honest. I can't say there is a lot of enthusiasm, then again most people responding still approach SC2013 as the successor to SC4. Which it is not. It's not surprising that they stumble over what is missing and what is lacking. Maybe that interview and the other report should have made more clear that "this is not the next SC4, approach this without coming from there". I've been trying to pay attention to what's going on and other than sharing cities they have yet to announce a single feature of Simcity2013 that absolutely requires the solo game to be online. Even the global economy can be simulated offline (it has to be moderated so the affect is the same is simulation). folks, the online play requirements do not come from those directions. It is simply a next step in developing revenue streams for further titles and part of EA's strategy on DRM. The idea is for DRM to not be seen as evil, so we package it as "we do so much calculations people that we need a cluster to do all those things, special, for you, so all takes place in the shiny cloud, special price my friend".

Incorrect actually. Valve is only seen as the "Apple" because it stands out to EA in terms of image. Innovative, quality, etc. All perceptions ofcourse, it is after all a business. But EA is striving to be the Apple of the games industry, because EA is striving towards an adoption / creation of the business model that Apple maintains for its operations. The target of EA is to create and facilitate what is known as a "lock-in market". Worth looking up. It is Valve that is actually moving towards an open platform market model, very much like Google in terms of parallels. It is a bit of irony in that regard. By the way, our industry is booming. More revenue streams and volumes than ever, accessible through much cheaper means and much more prospects for secondary revenue streams which are rapidly becoming much more interesting than the revenue streams of title release sales.

It would just be nice if you could manually save the game before unleashing a disaster, watching it all burn, and then resetting the clock to before you had a bit of a "let's play god" hiccup.

Soylent green. Nothing but that.

Well yeah, the trick is though to *not* approach it coming from SC4. Then it is an ok game for a bit of quick fun without having to engage the brain too much. Honestly, this is just not the successor to SC4, it is a new title in a franchise developed for todays trends prioritised by publishers for mass marketing. It's not bad. Unless you really like to immerse yourself and go for deep gameplay. Then it absolutely sucks. But that is not what it is designed for. They can alter that, introducing both immersion and deep gameplay (even "missing" basic functionality or realism aspects). But the sheer amount of DLC that would require constitutes a really interesting financial picture, to say the least. In a way the situation "as is" has a definite potential to be as full of issues and challenges as the Civ V issues of Firaxis resulting from publisher directives. That game was reduced to a shell, targeted for today's trends as chosen by the publisher, and they are still having quite a hard time reintroducing elements which they removed. But it's all good, because thanks to the same style of marketing the publisher met its set targets for release, and it has a very rewarding road of DLC. No matter how many people regard that as "expensive fixing of a degraded game" This is how it is today.

Hush, EA says everybody has unlimited always on internet