EA: DRM is a failed dead-end strategy

Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, EA Labels president Frank Gibeau acknowledged that DRM is a failed dead-end strategy that has no viable future in the gaming business. Curiously, Gibeau insists DRM has absolutely nothing to do with the game design of the new SimCity. Instead, Gibeau claims it was really a case of building a completely connected world with an MMO-like infrastructure, and added that EA should have done a better job in its messaging with the community to point out that SimCity is basically an MMO. Full details over here.

"It started with the team at Maxis that had a creative vision for a multiplayer, connected, collaborative SimCity experience where your city and my city and others' were [working together]; for better or for worse, and for right or for wrong, the lead designers and the producers and the programmers felt like they wanted to tell us a multiplayer, cooperative city story around SimCity. We had built a bunch of these and you could've gone deeper and deeper into your plumbing and managing toilets and electrical posts, but we felt there was a bigger story to tell and a bigger opportunity to chase with an always-on connected experience built around that concept. That's what we set out to design and that's what Maxis created and brought forward into the marketplace," Gibeau explained.

"At no point in time did anybody say 'you must make this online'. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience and when you're building entertainment... you don't always know what the customer is going to want. You have to innovate and try new things and surprise people and in this particular case that's what we sought to achieve. If you play an MMO, you don't demand an offline mode, you just don't. And in fact, SimCity started out and felt like an MMO more than anything else and it plays like an MMO," he continued.