Why "Always On" Is A Problem In Video Games
When EA announced the new SimCity, one of the items a lot of people jumped at was the news that it would have an "always on" system. "Always on" means that you have to have an internet connection to play the game, even if it is a single-player game. Internet goes out at your home? Traveling away from an internet connection? Too bad - you can't build your city.
"Always on" systems are no doubt going to become a lot more commonplace in the future. Primarily because it is a way for video game companies to protect themselves from piracy. If you can validate games on the fly, and they require a persistent connection to your servers, then you can lock out the pirated copies.
So the theory goes, anyway. In practice, it usually doesn't take long for a keygen to be whipped up by some clever person, and then you have ten million pirated copies that all appear (to the servers) to be legit.
In other words, this is yet another anti-piracy measure that only impacts legitimate users.
Worse, an "always on" system can become a huge disaster. People have long warned of the potential for catastrophe, but it's easy to dismiss these warnings as just the Chicken Little hand-wringings of a select few.
Until Diablo III launched.
Diablo III has been one of the longest anticipated video games in the history of the form. It is a single-player game, although you can play it in multiplayer mode (i.e. against your friends) if you like. But even the single-player mode requires that you play through Blizzard's servers.
Cue ominous music.
Perhaps predictably, Diablo III's launch date (May 15) created a huge spike in traffic. So huge that Blizzard, home of World of Warcraft, no stranger to the internet, basically got crushed. Blizzard's servers started kicking people out, creating login errors, and preventing everyone from playing their own game EVEN IN SINGLE-PLAYER MODE.
The problem was so catastrophic that it took down Blizzard's entire server farm, meaning that even World of Warcraft players couldn't play WOW thanks to the influx of Diablo III players. It was a dark day on the internet, let me tell you.
Is this the future of SimCity? EA has since clarified that you only need to go online to log into your game, and that you can go offline after validating. Small comfort, indeed.