I think Meier is hitting upon the real tension point of the tug-of-war. The publishers free up the space for the creative folks to do their stuff. They also make decisions-by-committee that baffle and sometimes infuriate customers (designers, and employees). They are the good guy and the bad guy. So it really is six one way, half a dozen the other. I support the folks who make the Minecrafts and the FTLs, and I support the creative folks who make the Civs and Elder Scrolls. It's when corporate runs amok (EA) that people flood to the indie scene. But as more and more crap comes out of Kickstarter, and half-finished products, and promises unkept, people will flock back. It really does go both ways, good and bad.

@blackothh It's tangible because the whole point of the Saints Row series is to push at the envelope. You might as well ask, "Why do the characters on South Park swear so much? It doesn't add anything tangible." No, it's the point of the artists who create these things to make a very goofy, morally ambivalent world. It is a middle finger to all those who claim to be our morality police. In Australia, the morality police win, I guess. Sad for them and not the best representation of a civilization with democratic values.

Why have a maturity rating at all if governments can just ban anything they want to. Morality police have never worked in any civilization. Your morals are not mine. If a maturity rating system exists, that is ample information for the public (and parents) to have at their disposal without an outright ban. Not sure how it works in Australia, but in the U.S. this would be a Constitutional violation.

Once the game goes single player with larger cities, I'll probably buy it. I hate the idea of giving money to EA but I've loved this series for too long to have the experience totally ended by them.

I'm actually surprised that game developers didn't see piracy coming from a mile away, long before it became trendy to pirate games. Doesn't anyone remember cassette tapes? With cassettes, I could record music off the radio, or I could copy my friend's tape onto my own. Within a very few short years, this became the norm. Remember the VCR? Suddenly I could record movies off of TV. It wasn't long before dual-sided VCRs came out, and you could copy one tape to another. Almost as soon as that happened, the big companies had to start implementing methods to prevent that copying from happening. But it kept happening. You can go a lot further back than that. Before the printing press, when a book was created, people would walk around with it literally handcuffed to themselves. The idea that information was power was supreme then, and only the privileged few had access to it, and they guarded it with their lives. Enter the printing press, and all that became moot.

I'm not stating here a moral position on pirating. I've seen plenty of people download games and play them for a long time, enjoying every minute, even expressing what a wonderful game they think it is, and never once give a thought to supporting the developers. I've also seen plenty of people pirate games and then, after a period of trying it out, either love it and buy the legit copy or hate it and just erase it, feeling very happy about not having blown $30- $70 on a piece of junk. In the end, intent is probably everything, and in the end, there is no one to monitor that beyond your own conscience and your 'higher power' or whatever.

Steam is a great example of providing games in a way that afford more benefits to the end-user than drawbacks. I hated Steam at first. I was just as vocally anti-Steam as I was any other kind of DRM attempt. Those always seemed, in the end, to punish me, the legit buyer, while the pirates downloaded away anyway to their hearts' content. I thought Steam was going to be another layer of annoyance for me. I abhor (and still do) being online to play a single-player game. I hated non-locally saved games. But when my computer crashed and I lost everything I had, when I got re-set up, I realized that without Steam, I would have lost hundreds of combined hours of gaming. So the layer of protection for them ALSO meant a layer of benefit for me. That's how you do it. You have to innovate and say, "Look, piracy is a problem, so we have to change a few things. But in doing so, we're going to provide further benefits to those who buy the games legit". I think Steam is a great model for this. Will I always prefer the non-DRM game? Yes. The Witcher 2 is a great example of a game that said, "Screw it, we're not punishing players for what criminals are doing". The result has been an overwhelmingly positive response from the gaming community, thus propelling their game into superstardom, which equates into profit.

Innovation is the answer. But my question is why no one saw this coming in the first place. It has happened to every medium of information transfer since the dawn of information transfer. You don't think some guy started copying what some other guy carved into a stone back when that's how we transferred information?

I just want my old single player games to continue to be single-player games. I stopped buying online-only single-player games because I had far too many problems reclaiming saved games, having saved games corrupted, tons of server-side downtime interrupting my play at the few key times in my days when I have time to play. Those cons far outweigh the benefits of scoring systems or the ability to get social with some 13 year old from Ohio with a cr*p attitude.

Not every gamer suddenly wants to be forced into social situations just because pirates have wrecked your business. Newsflash- the pirates keep on pirating, even fully-online, DRM-heavy games. Meanwhile, you are losing valued customers like me. As I said, I'll never again buy an online-only single-player game. I buy multiplayer when I want multiplayer, but when I want single-player, I just want a game that is saved on my computer that I can access anytime without an Internet connection.

If you think I am in the minority, you are simply stubbornly sticking to a failed DRM method, because the overwhelming (vastly overwhelming) majority of players have found SimCity's DRM exhausting, cumbersome and broken. They are also complaining en masse about the size of the cities, a limitation imposed by the "social features" of the game. In other words, this isn't SimCity anymore, it's some hybridized MMO thing. The next SimCity I buy will be an offline version. If it's never produced, we're done, you and I, SimCity. And that makes me sad.

The quality of this video makes me think it might be time for a revisit to the Dungeons & Dragons franchise in cinema! I don't care that this short film doesn't reflect what you'll see in the game - the trailer is amazing, and I'm quite sure the game will be amazing. It certainly will be for me anyway, someone who has invested many hours into the Elder Scrolls universe over several decades. I'm one of the purists who groaned when it was announced the next ES game would be online. As long as Beth keeps making epic, legendary single-player RPG's, I'm cool with it. Must admit, I secretly always wondered how an online version would be handled.