EA's SimCity Recovering From Epic Launch Failure

Posted on March 10, 2013

Electronic Arts new SimCity game was one of the most anticipated PC games of the year. Unfortunately, it has turned out to be one of the biggest failures. An always-on DRM feature doomed the game. The requirement for the game to be always connected to EA's services, which consistently failed, made it impossible for anyone to play the game for very long or at all.

Kotaku notes several other problems with the game, but the DRM always-on requirement is the primary reason for ruining the fun. If players are required to be always connected to Origin's servers and Origin's servers are not always available then this is not something that is going to work.

The game has thousands of one star reviews on Amazon. Amazon temporarily took down the game listing, before putting it back up with a warning that says, "Some customers may experience delays when connecting to SimCity servers. EA is actively working to resolve these issues. Please visit https://help.ea.com/en/simcity/simcity for more information. For your trouble, every SimCity player who has logged in and activated their game will receive a free PC download game from the EA portfolio, provided by EA. This offer extends to all digital download and physical disc SimCity customers. On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email from EA telling them how to redeem their free game."

Forbes reports that EA Maxis says it has reduced crashes by 92% since day one. They won't be at 100% for several more days. Forbes notes that Diablo III suffered similar always-on issues during its launch window, so it is certainly possible SimCity could fully recover and go on to huge sales. EA Maxis will need to get the uptime on its servers to near 100% and keep it there in order to do that.

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