Always-Online DRM Rant

Something that has annoyed me (and the rest of the internet) a bit recently is the always-online DRM that game publisher EA has released with the new SimCity game. As a Simcity fan who has played the games from as long ago as the SNES Simcity, through 2000 and Simcity 4 Deluxe, I am quite disappointed by this outcome.

So yeah, EA copied Ubisoft's bad example by having the DRM for their game require the player to be online and connected to their servers just to play singleplayer. What if I come home one day and my internet has gone offline for maintenance or something? That would mean I can't play my game.

This isn't the only problem however, EA's servers are, as it happens, complete crap! People who have bought the game cannot play it because they can't connect to EA's servers. People who do manage to finally play it get disconnected at regular intervals and lose all of their savedata because that is also hosted on EA's servers.

I guess what EA was thinking was to try and stop the imaginary millions of legions of pirates who are evil from stealing their games! Well I guess they succeeded, but their own bloody customers can't play the game either! What a great launch for what could have been a good game if not for it being completely ruined by its DRM.

I can safely say I will not be getting the new SimCity because of this and I'm glad I wasn't gullible enough to pre-order it. It's common knowledge that EA is a garbage publisher nowadays who has no idea what they are doing when it comes to the PC market, I'm not the only potential customer they've lost from bad business practices.