They could serve you for very little cost. But what if they believe that turning off the old games will likely get you to pay full price for a new game?
Planned obsolescence, and the idea that it is strategical to design something like a car to wear out in a few years is popularly believed to be clever and widely practiced.
However, harming your brand is far more damaging than a short term gain. New customers are far more expensive than repeat customers, and a previously angered customer is even more expensive. In the long term, value as perceived by customers gives companies more pricing freedom, and as long as there are competitors that do not collude, attempts to create scarcity ultimately will be counter productive.
>Planned obsolescence, and the idea that it is strategical to design something like a car to wear out in a few years is popularly believed to be clever and widely practiced.
"Planned obsolescence" is a grossly misunderstood and misused term. It's not a nefarious scheme to get you to buy more stuff. The term has meant a few different things over the years, but that isn't one of them.
It's a popular mis-use of the term to mean they're designing your car to break down so you have to buy a new one. Companies are smart enough to know the value of reputation.
The popular misconception is relevant to its efficacy, but I think the operational meaning of the term is generally well understood. There is a linguistics discussion to be had about prescriptivism and descriptivism as to whether it refers only to iterative increases in quality, or also intentional reliability.
To see the historical use of the term, I encourage you to glance at some of the literature[1] — especially in auto industry contexts.
Sure, but to http://books.google.com, though the front of the link doesn't make it obvious. You can alter it to focus on a specific time frame if you choose, or add a term about automobiles.
As you pointed out, the concept of intentional unreliability over time is like an anti-pattern for business, yet it is one encompassed by the term "planned obsolescence".
I'm sorry, but there are plenty of companies that have made great businesses out of producing less-reliable products.
If I buy a thing - almost any thing - from Walmart, I know that quality of that thing is not the first priority. A hammer from Walmart - theoretically a kind of good that can last forever - is going to be made from worse steel, the grip is going to fall off with heavy use, the wooden handle will splinter, it's going to rust. It will not last as long as a hammer purchased from Home Depot. On the other hand, it will be cheaper. Walmart is making a perfectly good business off of selling such goods.
Walmart chooses to stock lesser quality goods. We accept that as a legitimate business model. But Walmart doesn't come to my house and worsen the goods later on - they don't come and spray the hammer with salt-water to encourage me to get a new one. Digital goods don't fall apart on their own, so companies like EA which want to sell inferior goods have to take affirmative action to make them fall apart ("hey, let's link all our goods to a server, and turn the server off a few months after the good comes out"), and this doesn't sit well with us in our perceptions.
Only if you're misusing the term. As popularized by Stevens in 1954 it just means the car companies are going to use styling to get you to buy a new car before the old one wears out.
Not for game servers. We're talking about full applications that have to run somewhere, written years ago, by people that may not be at the company. Each additional game they have to support as a 24/7/365 service incurs some support costs that don't necessarily decrease over time, or with the active number of players.
What if the code in the game server contains non-GPL/free libraries? What if it includes bindings to proprietary services and sensitive data? How much time should EA devote to repackaging game server code for open source release, knowing that it will barely get any use and could only result in less sales in the future?
I can't imagine it would be more than a couple of hours work. Simcity is just authentication and saves, most games are even less than that. Heck, Battle.net is just a modified IRC server.
It would avoid a lot of the poop storm EA is facing with this. It's presumably costing them millions, and it's something they could have predicted when the beta crapped out.
Things have come a long way since Battle.NET, you're really not going to find that backend servers for any modern game are a simple thing.
Hell, any game that makes use of GFWL is going to be heavily dependent on the GFWL SDK. You can't release that, as it's under a fairly strick NDA. The same with any SteamWorks game.
While the SimCity servers handle those functions, apparently large portions of the economic and simulation calculations for regional activity in the game (i.e. what happens between cities) occurs on the server and would also need implementation and support.
...and then a fun game becomes a deterrent to buying the newest games. Of course, if the game is still fun, why not just keep the servers running and keep making money in subscription fees? What is the point of demanding that people pay for a new game when you can just charge them for old games?
