Should all Games Require an Internet Connection?

SimCity comes out today in the UK and came out earlier this week elsewhere (damn you rest of the world!). It’s the first proper SimCity game by developer Maxis since 2003 and there’s a huge focus on multiplayer play. Different players take control of different cities and develop alongside each other, potentially in real time. This is EA’s excuse for making the game require a constant internet connection, you can’t play the game without one, that coupled with a server issues has led to the standard trashing of SimCity on Metacritic user reviews, as I’m writing this there are 1,180 negative reviews with an average of 1.5 (out of 10). This is clearly an issue that has riled much of the SimCity community, but with piracy being such a huge issue, is it right for developers to require an internet connection?

Let’s not kid ourselves, EA has clearly implemented this scheme on SimCity as DRM (Digital Rights Management), in other words to stop piracy. Piracy is a huge problem for all media industries, film and TV suffer just as badly as games and music suffers worse. Beside the point that it is criminal, piracy gives developers a hard time. They lose money because of it because fewer people buy their games. You may think that someone like EA or another gaming behemoth may not be affected, you’d be wrong. These companies are still profitable despite piracy, but the situation could be very different. Video games are one of the lesser affected industries by piracy so that with the fact that most people never see or hear about developers means the effects are often a little less evident. EA may not be crashing down because of piracy, even Maxis will probably survive despite it, but its smaller developers, those without huge financial backing and with whose livelihoods depend on one game, they are the biggest losers from piracy.

The kind of video game pirate publishers don't hate

I mentioned in a previous article that developers can invest lots of money into a game and often rely on one game at a time, particularly the smaller ones. By putting all their eggs into one basket, there is a huge risk involved and if that game fails, then the company may also go bust. Smaller developers need all the money they can get, they do not make millions, many struggle to simply stay afloat, so the loss of a tens or hundreds of copies can be detrimental potentially. Every year, countless games companies are shut down, earlier this year we had THQ, a huge games publisher, close down, no doubt piracy played a part in that.

These small developers are often independent and so not only do they get less funding, less of their games get bought, pirating an indie game means you are denying a larger percentage of potential profit than if you pirated a blockbuster game. The indie game development scene is trying to find a way of reaching out to a wider community, if that wider community is not buying their games, indie developers may have a very limited future.

Almost everyone will agree (most hypocritically) that piracy is wrong, most people however don’t care. They do not see the effects of it and are stuck in their own individual world. Even those who don’t pirate may have a problem with anti-piracy measures. These measures, like requiring a constant internet connection can be frustrating and problematic and they punish the good, the bad and the ugly.

Though not as big a problem in the Western world, not all gamers have access to an internet connection. By implementing such a scheme means you have already alienated a proportion of your market, hence you are already losing money. The number of people cut out must be less than the number who would have pirated the game but have instead bought it, otherwise it makes no financial sense.

The internet is not a universal amenity, it may seems so in the West but go to slightly poorer countries where gamers still do exist and you’ll find people who are left out by such schemes totally. Even in the West, though most people may have internet, not everyone has a connection that is fast or reliable enough to handle a game, so that’s even more people cut out, unnecessarily you could argue. Playing an online game and seeing lag and frame-rate drops will show you how many people still don’t have an internet connection that is good enough for pristine gaming. Not only is there the speed of the whole service but the reliability of it too. Cheap ISPs often have poor service and games will require a constant uninterrupted connection. You would have seen your FIFA match destroyed by poor connection as if a certain Turkish referee had come and refereed the game. In SimCity you might see hours of hard work destroyed by an intermittent connection as if you’d unleashed a disaster in your city.

"EA Servers are down, we apologise for fu***ing up your game"

It is not necessarily on your side either. EA has been having server issues all week with SimCity (and for a considerable amount of time longer for other games), thus stopping people playing a game which they have paid £35 for. You've done nothing wrong, and yet you can’t play your game because EA have screwed up (again).

With the internet always comes the idea of safety. Though unlikely, having your game constantly connected means that it is more vulnerable than if it wasn't  SimCity for many will still be a single player game and running the risk of losing something in game or having your account hacked is not worth it simply to play multiplayer with others.

Piracy is a huge problem for the gaming industry and it is only gaining momentum. Already developers are going bust and this will only continue unless piracy rates decrease. But no one likes being forced to do something, particularly when you feel like you’re being punished for the wrong-doing of others. In order to stop piracy developers, publishers and distributors will have to find a more ingenious method. At the end of the day, can you really prevent piracy? The only way to stop it is to change people’s mind sets. Gamers need to be persuaded to part with their cash, not be forced to. Publishers need to take a more softly softly approach. They need to deal with the situation like Gandhi and not like Stalin, after all, India is a rising superpower and Russia, well isn't.