As for it being the future of games, sadly the answer is yes, for major games.For the projects I've worked on and the stats I have seen piracy is normally 90% to 95% for major titles. I have watched as my own work hit a 93% piracy rate on our server telemetry. Always-online requirements and SaaS are one of the best ways to combat piracy. For some reason people don't complain about it any more with Valve

^ I agree with everyone except frob. And seriously OP, you didn't knew the new SimCity would require an always on connection and its a pure (more or less) multiplayer game?

I have a full time job, and generally don't spend hours and hours pouring over news sites and watching every last scrap of information pouring in on development of many games. Sure, I knew it was a highly social centred game, and was heavily focused on the online aspect, but it isn't like any of the devs were screaming:

"Yeah, and if the servers go down, you're totally boned and have zero access to any element of the game... And they're going to go down a lot."

I test games professionally as a near-shore contractor, and have dealt with dozens of games with highly social focused designs. Generally every game that comes across my desk with a "Single player Social" design aspect (Where game play is primarily single player, but with general social interaction as more of a meta-game) has a very simple design of when the network dies you carry on with your single player experience, and feel only slightly cut off from the rest of the game play.

When we find a game that utterly fails and craps itself when it can't see the server, we log that as a bug "User is unable to play game".

There is really Nothing in the game play design that would limit a user from working primarily offline. Worse, with their cloud only save they have this fun aspect where the game will happily Over Write Your stuff! Got back on awhile ago to find that part of what I had been doing when it was giving me 'warnings' of not being able to see the server was gone. "No great loss, I changed my mind and don't actually want to expand my city like that" was my thought when I saw the problem. Played some more, rebuilt the expansion in a more sensible manner, switched to another city in the region and returned to my first one: Oh look, that crappy expansion I decided I didn't want, and built better version of? Yeah, that one is back, and all my far better expansion has now disappeared.

Bugs and flaws like that are the kind of stuff I expect a first week newbie at a testing house to spot and point out.

(But in general, I'm less than impressed with the city building in this newest edition. Their curved street planning is wonderful, but they've horribly botched it by apparently sticking with rectangular lots, while making zone design even less informative about expansion and growth than previous titles. Where is the setting to view entire lot sizes so I have half an idea of how things are growing? I was playing heavily with circles and arcs, only to find out later that the high density stuff won't actually expand inside the huge circular road sections because their rectangular footprints would overlap and they block each other instead of fudging area with flexible building foundations)

People whine and complain about games that pull this kind of thing, and yet people still buy those offending games. Look at Diablo 3. Hideous launch problems, constant whining about how this is an abomination that must be ended... and yet one of the largest single-day sales records ever. Really? I mean, not to trot out the dead old D3 horse again, but this SimCity thing is the same exact thing, the same exact user abuse. And yet, people still bought it. As long as people continue to buy this shit, they are going to continue to stuff it down our throats. We're rewarding bad behavior. And yes, I'm guilty. I did buy D3, even against my better judgement. That was the last AAA game I've bought, and that will probably be the last game I ever buy from a AAA publisher. I just won't reward this stupid crap any more. Despite the fact I own the previous SimCity games, and despite the fact that I enjoyed the hell out of them, EA (and Actiblizz, and Ubisoft, and every other asshole company that wants to treat me like a criminal and disallow me from playing games I purchased) won't get any more of my money. I'm done with it, I'm done with them.

/soapbox

I didn't play diablo 3 on launch day, but I did find the whole launch process to be absolutely hilarious. You would think a company that runs one of the largest MMOs in the world could LAUNCH a game without massive issues. Guess not.

I did buy and play Diablo 3, I was very disappointed in the product. It was not a game that I found enjoyable. It is no longer installed, and after hitting max level, I didn't even bother with the top level difficulty because the idea of running through the EXACT same maps repeatedly offered me none of the replay that Diablo 2 still has. Nor did the itemization offer any sort of variation, due to the limited stats and applicability of runes, etc.

Meanwhile Diablo 2 is still installed

I'm not a Sim CIty person, I have Sim City 2000 somewhere around here, but it was not a game I enjoyed much, just not my kind of a game. Nonetheless, the idea that it would be an ONLINE "MMO" style game is actually quite startling.

Another prime example of horrible online issues: Splinter Cell. A game whose single player requires a constant online connection to Ubisoft's servers. Its great fun to lose a bunch of progress simply because someone at Ubi decided to reboot the server you're connected to and thus get booted out of your single player game.

Speaking of Steam:

While I'm not a huge fan of steam they have managed to CONSISTENTLY avoid these same issues that are being experienced right now by people. Borderlands 2? No issues at all playing it on launch day. Nor any of the other games I've bought through steam, with the exception of some of the early ones, like HL2.

So how does steam manage it? Here's a hint: Look at the URLs in your network snooper sometime. You might be surprised to know that they use the amazon cloud to scale automatically. Instead of, you know, having a bunch of servers at a data center somewhere.

So is this trend going to end? No. If anything it will become more common. My only HOPE is that these companies... EA, Activision, etc. will hire some people who actually know what the hell they're doing (with relation to cloud/scalability) and not do the typical game developer thing of rediscovering the same ideas the rest of the software industry figured out decades prior.

This sort of thing used to bother me, it really doesn't anymore. Why is that? Well, because the minute I see a single-player game requiring a permanent connection, well that game may as well not exist for me, it just leaves my brain and the possibility of buying it just disappears completely.

My curiosity for the trend in general is for 5+ years down the road. I mean, I still regularly play games from the mid 90s... when its the year 2025 and no one plays this simcity game anymore, will there still be a server to connect to? And if not, I really hope EA and those like them have the brainpower to realize that releasing a version that doesn't require said server for a bargain basement price is still good business seeing as it won't make a dime without the server.

EDIT: Just looked over a page of the best selling pc games of all time by copies sold. I realize you can't draw conclusions about an industry based on one game, but my god, how in the world has Minecraft sold that many copies? It has no real DRM (at least, not in the sense we tend to understand the term), so if DRM is the only thing keeping pirates from ruining everything, how is it the 8th best selling game of all time?

if DRM is the only thing keeping pirates from ruining everything, how is it the 8th best selling game of all time?

Because, as we all know, reducing piracy is not the same as increasing sales. They're not opposites