Recently, EA came out with the most recent installment of SimCity–a game that didn’t classically contain multiplayer and spoke to more or less a core solo-player audience. However, in EA Maxis’s infinite wisdom SimCitty 5 was launched to be always-online and multiplayer only. Hence the name of this sort of game “always-connected” referring to the need for an Internet connection to the game publisher’s servers in order to allow people to play a game that is ostensibly solo.

We’ve seen this before when the most recent offering of Blizzard’s popular singleplayer Diablo series saw the release of always-connected Diablo III.

Unfortunately, gaming companies seeking to drag singleplayer experience games kicking and screaming into mutliplayer even if you don’t want to has been fraught with problems. SimCIty Online was racked with massive server outages, slow connections, and other maladies that made it impossible to play on launch. The consumers and industry wouldn’t be surprised by this because this is exactly what happened to Blizzard’s Diablo III. The worst part? People who would have been fine without multiplayer suddenly found their game hampered by being forced into multiplayer with no benefit.

SimCity fans reacted with a fury to this necessity. The backlash even led Amazon to pull the game from the digital download in order to staunch orders while the servers failed–a fix that took over a week to take effect and aftershocks remained an issue.

EA defended their use of servers to run players’ cities, going as far as suggesting that the heavy lifting and calculations were being made on Maxis’s infrastructure to allow the game to run more quickly on customers’ computers. To allow for offline play would require “a significant amount of engineering,” a company rep is quoted saying.

Of course, this wouldn’t last. a source within Maxis eventually came forward to say that there was no such need and that the servers didn’t actually do any heavy lifting or computation whatsoever–just multiplayer connectivity. A fact eventually confirmed when a mod arrived on the gaming scene that enabled the game to play offline just fine.

It’s just a trussed up and whitewashed version of the dreaded DRM

A moneymaking scam.

In the case of Diablo III developer and publisher Blizzard claimed the reason for the game’s always-connected status would be necessary to keep the game’s real-money-transfer (RMT) auction house from being overwhelmed with exploits and crash sales. A reason that most of the industry guessed must have ignored that Diablo I and II separated players who wanted to play in hackable (or ad hoc solo-play to multiplayer) and those who wanted to play in regulated multiplayer. And then, hackers still managed to duplicate items and exploit the system even with the always-connected system on.

In EA Maxis’s case it’s a case of pure deception. The multiplayer infrastructure that Maxis ran had nothing to do with the game itself and did nothing to support the game for soloplayer experience–in fact, all it did was makes it impossible for anyone to play the game in any fashion.

Why? To make Maxis more money. First, always-connected would serve as a form of DRM, enabling EA Maxis to make certain that each person who bought their game actually bought it (by selling keys matched to that version). Second, it would also help Maxis push players towards buying more expansions to keep up with their friends–to play with them.

At this point we can conclude wholeheartedly that the always-online DRM of SimCity Online is indeed “defective by design.” Companies like EA and Blizzard must stop mistreating their customers by providing them with inherently broken products and expecting them to pay top dollar to play them.

I’m not interested in a $60 game that I cannot play and knowing that older SimCity titles often come with DLC, I’m not willing to watch and wait for a product that might end up costing me ~$140 over the years when one glitch in my Internet or EA’s servers will mean I can’t play.