Why are all the professional gaming sites out there glossing over the fact that all this "connected services" BS is simply window dressing designed to cover up what these travesties really are: poorly though out DRM/anti-piracy protection schemes? The connected features of SimCity would be entirely optional if it weren't for EA's obsession with DRM that does absolutely nothing to limit actual piracy. The irony is, this time they have managed to come up with the perfect protection scheme, a game that no one can play, pirates included.
@nocoolnamejim I don't disagree on the franchise fatigue, but hasn't AC4 been in development for two years now (hardly rushed)? I seem to remember reading that a different studio was working on AC4 while another one was finishing AC3. Reminds me of Activision's work with CoD, though that is not exactly a stellar example, considering the copy/paste quality of the last few games.
Article was tl;dr the whole thing, so if this kind of thing was mentioned, sorry. Adam Sessler had an interesting take on the social aspects over at Rev3: what if a dev takes advantage of it to create a D&D type multiplayer RPG where one of the players actually acts as the dungeon master, like in the P&P game? Vampire Redemption tried to do something like that back in the day, though it wasn't very successful at the time, it could be interesting now.
@blutosan Unfortunately, it seems the courts are afraid of making a definitive decision on such things. They would rather the two plaintiffs work it out between themselves, saving the judges from making any kind of decision.
Does this guy even know what the internet is? The majority of consumers probably already know about the announcement, it's been featured on every major gaming and tech news site and I've even seen stories about it pop up on business and general news sites as well. Does he expect Sony to not start their own advertising push to go along with it (assuming the announcement is a PS4 reveal)? MS is really starting to sound desperate now, though considering no announcement has actually happened yet, I don't know why.
@VolcanoMan001 Name one game or dev that has been directly and conclusively proven to be hurt by used game sales... you can't, because it hasn't happened. The idea that used games hurt devs was put forward by publishers that greedily want a piece of the used game pie that they have absolutely no rights to. They floated the concept in the hopes that the gaming sheep out there would buy into it, as many obviously have. The fact is, the used market (which includes much more than just those bastards at GameStop whom I refuse to buy from) has existed since the beginning of consoles and it has done nothing to hinder the growth of the game industry. Again, if used sales were really that bad, the video game industry would not be looking at a $67 billion year worldwide last year or their projected growth to $82 billion by 2017:
Revenue figures like that do not lie, unlike the publishers, who will say or do anything to appease their shareholders, even at the expense of the consumer.
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