Have played most of the major racing franchises on consoles the last 10+ years, and even though I love tinkering with the car settings and going round and round the same track to shave 0.3 of a second of a hot lap time in Forza 5, there is something about just flooring it on a country road, or simply just go for a ride to explore the game world.
@thorn3000When the developers have made a deal with publishers that is where the money should be channeled. It's not up to you to decide, the developers have already made that decision for you. It is exactly the same as with musicians that decide to publish their work via a record company in return for (typical) stuff like financing of the recording itself or money up front. The artist have made their choice about who should get the money from the product - no one forces them to do that, but most are too greedy to finance stuff themselves.
This is the way business works - the final transaction is between the one that is authorized to sell the product to you, not to people further back in the chain that has already gotten paid or will be paid as a percentage of the final sales price.
Maybe things are different in your world, but I knew lots and lots of people - the vast majority in fact - that never ever bought a single PC game back in the day even though they played every major release.
Nowadays i primarily play on my 360, the SimCity experience being my first PC game for a couple of years (and probably my last PC game ever following this fiasco).
@jonanamar >> Piracy actually made a very minor dent in developer's incomes throughout the history of gaming
Oh, there are quite a few games that 'everyone' has played but has only sold a few 100 thousand legal copies...
Piracy IS a problem on the PC platform, but going to such extremes as EA now has done with Simcity is of course totally unacceptable when they are not interested in having good capacity at launch.
A fair review considering the current server conditions and downgrading of features.
Kudos to Gamespot for taking all the current problems into consideration - this is how reviews should be, not something based on a tailor-made experience created pre-release for reviewers.
This sums up the current state of SimCity very well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlLwtc6H_SY
According to some reviews the 'hotfixes' (in other words removing lots of features) have changed the game a lot from what was reviewed. So much in fact that the scores are being reduced as we speak. Check this one that cut the score from 9.5 to 4(!):
Given this currently horrendous state of both accessibility and playability, and acknowledging the fact that even the drastic changes EA has made to the game in its attempts to address them haven't worked, it is hard to continue to recommend SimCity. The experience currently on offer is now significantly altered from what was reviewed.
http://www.polygon.com/game/simcity-2013/2630
I am so happy sites have started doing this - delivering reviewers an experience that are far from what the average gamer will get should surely be punished in reviews!
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