User blog comment:Lost Labyrinth/The fall of The Sims series/@comment-1519608-20130308030219

Sadly I see this pattern you describe continuing up until it no longer provides profit for EA. I think any future main game that is released will incorporate the always-on DRM that is utilized by SimCity, and people by in large will probably accept it and buy the game anyways because of the new multiplayer features that will be included with it. There will be a vocal and visible minority of gamers who will protest, just as they do now with SimCity and they did with Diablo III, but the numbers speak for themselves as far as EA is concerned. Diablo III netted millions of copies sold, despite its problems, and SimCity is likely to do the same. Only when the gaming community by and large reject this particularly insidious example of DRM will EA, and other big game publishers, change their ways. And who knows what other kind of idea they will come up with next?

Another thing which bothers me personally, which may be slightly off-topic to your blog but which I believe is more broadly relevant, is the reverence people hold towards Maxis. I've seen so many times, on this wiki and elsewhere on the internet, comments to the effect of 'Oh, Maxis was involved, so the game must be good,' or 'hopefully Maxis can make a good game, despite EA meddling.' I think people don't fully realize the relationship that Maxis has with EA - to put it bluntly, Maxis is EA. The unique and independent entity that was Maxis was long ago hollowed out and stripped of most of its former parts. The vast majority of Maxis workers were not working for Maxis when it created the prior SimCity games or when it created The Sims. Those few that do remain, and that weren't shuffled around to different EA divisions, have either been beaten into line by EA or fully adhere to the particular model of game development that EA supports - make a game where we can continue to exploit the gamers, even months or years after release. The Maxis that we knew died long, long ago, and we only do ourselves a disservice by naively thinking that today's Maxis is anything like the one we used to know.

The Sims 4 will be a Maxis title, and it will have Always-On DRM, and it will have first day DLC - the sort of thing that makes you think "Gee, if this DLC is available on day one, why wasn't it included in the game?" - and it will have forced multiplayer. I am not a game designer or a psychic, but all this is painfully obvious. We as gamers need to realize that EA isn't the one failing - we are. We are failing to demand that our game designers actually sell us a useable product, and sell us a product that we can know with certainty will be useable at a later date. We fail every time a person goes out and buys a game with all the features I've mentioned because buying the game supports the reasoning that EA has bet on. They've bet on the fact that only a certain portion of the population will contest these features, while the majority will by-in-large accept whatever game they throw at them. KPST wouldn't have been made if EA didn't think know that it would make money. Neither would Pets or Seasons or University. And you can just as well bet that the features in those three expansions will be noticeably absent from an eventual TS4. Why? Because we as a game-buying community allow them to get away with the same trick over and over... selling us our content piecemeal when they should be putting it all in the base game.

The writing is on the wall.