Get better at an arcade game, and you can play longer on the same quarter. With freemium, you pay more so that you don’t have to wait for things, or so you can get bonus items that aren’t available to people who play for free. I’ve seen freemium likened to pumping quarters into arcade games, which I loved doing as a kid in the early 80s, but it’s really not the same thing at all. It’s pretty and addictive, to a point, but the freemium aspects are incredibly frustrating. I’ve also been playing the new SimCity: Build-It lately on my phone, because I never learn. But it was really The Sims, released in the year 2000, that catapulted the company into stardom, with blockbuster sales across the entire lineup, and with expansion packs and versions of the games on the PC, consoles, and mobile devices. Old fogies like me remember SimCity and its related spin-offs (the innovative SimEarth the newer SimCity 2000, 3000, and 4 and so on) more than what came afterward. I think if I had known that mess was in my future, I wouldn’t have minded the maroon piece of paper so much. Meanwhile, EA’s flaky servers made the game much more unreliable than it needed to be. Later a developer even said it straight out. Well, EA and Maxis have never admitted it straight out, but their various hemming and hawing about multiplayer and trading fooled no one, and a modder proved it wasn’t a technical requirement. The 2013 version of the game, aside from a number of baffling design decisions involving the way you built your cities, required an always-on Internet connection as a form of digital rights management. Little did I know that over two decades later, EA and Maxis would infuriate the entire game industry with its DRM-encoded, always-on, pseudo-multiplayer version of SimCity. I’d still play anyway, because it was such a great game. It was dark red and blue because that made it almost impossible to photocopy. I’ll never forget the maroon-and-dark-blue sheet that came with the game you were supposed to use it to look up the right answer to a question on screen before you could start playing. I also remember something horrendously frustrating about it: the copy protection.
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