Don't like always-online consoles? #DealWithIt | 10 Years Ago This Month

gamesindustry.biz:

The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.

Last month we revisited the always-offline launch debacle of Electronic Arts' always-online SimCity.

It went about as poorly as an always-online game launch could go, but EA refused to budge on it being a colossal mistake, publicly insisting it was not just a matter of a widely loathed company – EA was about to win Consumerist's Worst Company in America poll for the second year in a row – forcing unnecessary DRM into a traditionally single-player franchise.

As EA Labels president Frank Gibeau told us at the time, "At no point in time did anybody say 'you must make this online'. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience and when you're building entertainment..."

Now that we're a decade down the line, people are more comfortable telling us that was a steaming pile of horse manure.

"SimCity was one of the most pirated [series] of all time and so there was a directive to find: 'How can we make this un-piratable'," SimCity lead designer Stone Librande told PC Gamer in a retrospective piece last month.

And while you might think the vociferous blowback against SimCity's wretched launch would have made other companies think twice about imposing online requirements that weren't strictly essential to the experience, you