So I’m sitting in bed as I don’t feel well today and decide that even with the bad reviews I want to play SimCity… If I’d know how bad the installation process is, I might have not bothered.
#1 Purchasing direct from E.A. is not easy and uses Digital River.
I want to purchase this game from the Mac App Store, but as it’s not there yet. I tried to purchase directly from EA. I live in Taiwan, and am still learning to read Chinese. The E.A. insisted on forcing everything to be in Chinese, making it almost impossible for me to do anything, then at the bottom I noticed it’s powered by Digital River. The same company that has continually caused me headaches for my own business. I don’t want to give DR any more money.
#2 So I find it on MacGameStore and purchasing through them, is nice and easy, until I come to download the game.
The first download is very quick, I open it up… It’s not the game but a loader that has to download another app… A few moments later, it’s downloaded some game management application. I follow the instructions and go to download the game.
It downloads an E.A. Origin installer instead. I go to open that up and it tells me that the Origin app is out of date and I must download a new one. So I download the new Origin app.
It then tries to install a helper tool that runs in the background of my computer. I don’t want this, but if I cancel I can’t move on the next step. I cave in.
#3 Now I need to create an Origin account. Which seems easy enough, except that it’s horribly slow and keeps asking me lots of useless questions before letting me proceed.
#4 After 20 mins, I’m in and… It insists on displaying everything in Chinese, yet the preferences are clearly set to “English”. This Origin app is horrible to use (partly because it’s soooooo slow and because it’s all web based.
#5 Another 20 mins and the game is downloaded.
So 40 mins after paying, downloading 5 apps and jumping through too many hurdles, I can actually try the game I just shelled out for.
This is a rant, but I’m posting it here as an example of how NOT to treat customers. I already don’t feel well and a bad installation experience such as this doesn’t make me feel positive about spending over $50!
Welcome to Origin! Us gamers have been hating it for a long time. SimCity fully requires it. On Windows, it isn’t so bad, but it’s no Steam.
I was in the SimCity beta, but never actually got to play. I’d download it, try to play, and just sit there staring at my desktop while some SimCity music played in the background. They knew about all the problems well before launch. From what I’ve read, the Mac launch went almost as bad as the Windows launch.
Hopefully you can enjoy it. Given my problems during beta and all the issues I’ve read about, I never bothered to purchase. Maybe if I see it on sale for dirt cheap.
Wow. I’ve seen a few things like that and I don’t know how such companies stay in business. We all need to be thinking about erasing such purchase friction as much as we can.
BTW, those free icons you (Sam) tweeted about the other day on paddle.com were almost that bad:
it required me to enter my email address at least three or four times (initially, again to set up an account, and third time to actually get the download)
it required I tweet about the offer, but hid that in the unseen “second step” that I didn’t see until I’d already given my email in the first step (or I wouldn’t have bothered)
it then required I set up a paddle.com account (with a password, address into, etc.)
it then took me through 3-4 screens before I actually got to the download, including forcing me to copy and paste a coupon code into another window after I “bought” the icons and then got my purchase price reduced to zero during the checkout process (very confusing for a “free” item).
It eventually worked, but I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for free and I’d already put so much effort into it. I’m still not sure it was worth it!
It’s turned me off paddle.com as a purchase site, so their promo has driven me away as a potential customer. Smart business plan!
(And I deleted my tweet as I didn’t want to encourage others to go through that hassle.)
(I hope I don’t take the focus off this conversation by adding my positive impressions
I play quite a few games as well. I actually like Steam, and even though it force the current country on your if you want to make a purchase, support told me a way to purchase with my US credit card even when I’m not in the US. So, +1 for their support (no chinese for me!)
Also, I was pleasantly surprised that I could re-download the Mac versions of games I had long ago purchased for Windows (back when there was no Steam for OSX yet), such as Half-Life 2.
The best experiences so far I had with gog.com, though. Their installers are fast and uncomplicated. They do a quality job packing together old games and selling them for cheap.
And I had once installed a game with Origin on my Mac, too. I believe it was Battlefield. Had to be online all the time, IIRC, and even the game was, as a single player mission, rather boring. Double disappointment.
Anyone playing Borderlands 2 here? That’s a great and fun FPS, especially when playing in a team up to 4!
Origin isn’t that terrible. It’s just the hallmark example of what happens when a large company wants to use its size to its advantage. They formed a committee to replicate the basic functionality of Steam while focusing on their own catalog. I don’t believe Steam took off because of its catalog though. It took off because of the crazy sales that hit a few times a year. I have literally hundreds of games I paid very little for.
I agree with Thomas about gog.com, it’s a great service.
I have very little time for games these days, the only games I play with any regularity (more than once a year) are Civilization (usually the original DOS version using Boxer on my Macs) or, in the last few years, Red Dead Redemption (and to keep things on topic, good to see MS are dropping the dumb Microsoft points system on Xbox Live, and dealing in regular currency).
I used to play a lot of SimCity and SimCity 2000 in the 80s and 90s, before the series lost its way. The recent rebirth looks much more like something I’d be interested in but it’s been a disaster. I pre-ordered at the start of the year and then they announced a delay to the Mac version. So I got a refund. I stupidly bought it again on Friday, before I had read about all the problems people were having. I wasted an hour on Friday trying to get it to work - reinstalled Origin twice but it usually just bounces a few times on my Dock before mocking me by quitting silently. I’ve got as far as SimCity itself bouncing on the Dock, but again, nothing. I’m annoyed with myself that I wasted an hour on it and amazed that the Mac launch has failed so badly. Perhaps I shouldn’t be amazed, but I thought they would have been much more careful after the PC launch.
I’ll give them a couple of weeks and try again. I have so much love for Apple’s App Stores in comparison to this nonsense.
Deus Ex Human Revolution is another fantastic one. I don’t believe you installed Battlefield on your Mac. I think only 2142 was Mac compatible, and I don’t think the Mac version is available on Origin. I could be wrong though. I don’t pay too close attention to Mac gaming, as I gave up and went to Windows for my game years ago.
I find this post amusing because I had to deal with the same thing, almost exactly, when SimCity was first released a few months ago. Now I’m dreading the install on my Mac with all the news about it in the past few days. I guess I’ll wait until I have a full day available to tackle this challenge.
Thankfully the game is fantastic (IMHO). Yes there are issues and one of the first things I encountered was reaching the city limits. But that does make it also more of a challenge.
Sadly it’s not Retina ready, and makes my MBP battery last about 1:30 mins. It also doesn’t offer a native resolution for my 27" screen and if the animations are anything above low~medium, it chokes (running on a rMBP 2.6 Ghz i7 with a 1gb GeForce GT 650M), so I wonder what specs you need for ‘Ultra’!
The irony is, if I had illegally copied the game, not only would I have saved $50, but I wouldn’t have had to jump through the hoops to play it. It’s like those anti-piracy ads on DVDs, but I bought the damn thing - why are you wasting my time?
For what it’s worth, I’ve been playing SimCity since it was released for the pc in the spring via parallels. The Mac version is more stable than the windows version ever was. Yes there are lots of hoops, but once you’re through them, it’s a very enjoyable game.
You’re halfway right. I installed it via Bootcamp, now I remember.
That’s also explains why the Origin installation doesn’t bother me any more: because it’s not on my OSX system
Have just spent another 90 mins trying to get SimCity to run. Good news is that Origin is now running for me (after cleaning out Library, sudo rm-ing files, rebooting, creating a new user account, downloading an Origin update etc…). I think it’s now down to a resolution issue. I’ve read that it doesn’t support the resolution of a 27" iMac and I know you can change the resolution in the game properties, but I can’t find a setting that will make more than small segment of the game visible.
I’m still really keen to play it. SimCity has always appealed to my OCD side, much like coding does. This time I really will give them a couple of weeks and then try again
It doesn’t, you have to choose a much lower resolution 1600 x 900 I think is what I’m using. You have to set the visual settings before you start the game (Which is a PITA in trying to get the right balance between speed and detail).
I can’t even see the settings because only a small portion of the screen is visible in the window. So I can see text at the bottom of the window, a bit of the backdrop and I’m missing the buttons to start the game, change settings etc. Do you run it with the -w windowed flag?
Origin is refusing to run for me again. I’m absolutely definitely going to leave it for a while this time, I’ve far too much work to do for this nonsense!
Oh I See… I didn’t do anything special when launching it.
Have you tried obliterating the entire lot form your computer and doing a clean install, use something like iTrash to find and kill everything related to Origin and SimCity.
