"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 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. For the folks who have conspiracy theories about evil suits at EA forcing DRM down the throats of Maxis, that's not the case at all," he said with a laugh.įor EA and Maxis, Gibeau said it really was a case of building a completely connected world with an MMO-like infrastructure. So what we tried to do creatively is build an online service in the SimCity universe and that's what we sought to achieve. "DRM is a failed dead-end strategy it's not a viable strategy for the gaming business. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience" "At no point in time did anybody say 'you must make this online'. Not only was DRM not a topic of internal discussion at EA, Gibeau said, but the executive also made it very clear that DRM is simply not an option for publishers anymore. You don't build an MMO because you're thinking of DRM - you're building a massively multiplayer experience, that's what you're building." Speaking to GamesIndustry International at GDC this week, Gibeau commented, "That's not the reality I was involved in all the meetings. Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw's blog post seemed to only stir the pot, but EA Labels president Frank Gibeau now insists that DRM had absolutely nothing to do with the game's design whatsoever. EA moved as fast as it could to rectify the situation, but some players felt EA's real intent was to force DRM on its customers. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be good for any game's launch, but when a title is designed to be always online, and countless players therefore can't even play the game they just purchased, the situation quickly escalates. The recent launch of SimCity was a troubled one for Electronic Arts, as the company struggled to get its servers fully functional.