The SimCity Scandal: When Good Games Go Bad

The complaints were early coming in. Months in advance of the game release, developers took to Reddit to have the public ask about the highly-anticipated new SimCity game. Things started off promisingly enough, with lots of oos and ahhs at the shiny new graphics engine. But quickly, a pesky little detail came to light that shut down all the praise: SimCity needed to be connected to the internet at all times to play. No single player offline mode, no working on a city while at the airport. No internet, no game.

It got worse from there, as the city sizes were set artificially small, forcing you to rely on other cities for big projects or zoning that your city didn’t have room to fit. The ‘agent’ mechanic, giving every individual citizen a motivation allowing you to follow them around all day, never lived up to the early ambitions, and tracking inhabitants all day revealed an AI on par with that of a gerbil. The curved streets are great once you figure out how to lay them, but even that can take ages.

And then came launch day, and with thousands of pre-orders ready to go, the servers, predictably enough, crashed under the weight, and, without an offline mode, no one was playing anything. Weeks later, and the servers are still a massive problem, putting players into queues of nearly an hour, making them rely on regions where other players might screw you over if they detonate their power plant. All in all, the so-called ‘vision’ of taking a single-player game and making it online and multiplayer only, and then making that multi-player experience so painful, has cost EA dearly.

Already EA’s CEO has resigned amidst the outcry, the company has released several of its existing titles for free to buyers by way of apology, and yet still, the bad PR keeps coming in. It’s clear now that multi-player was never part of a grand dream, just a harsh way of cracking down on piracy by forcing all gameplay online. And in light of a hacker demonstrating a quick fix that lets players go offline without a problem, as well as a recent report that shows piracy has no effect on sales, the game looks increasingly emblematic of why online-only DRM isn’t a solution to anything, even profits, for EA.

I’d love to review and recommend this game, but at present, there’s not much to review or recommend. If things are patched and the limitations of the game are removed, it may be worth revisiting. But as it stands, a great brand and a great ambition have been utterly sabotaged by misplaced and ineffective greed.