Paying customers are not getting what they paid for, and understandably, there are consumers looking for a refund. Fortunately, EA global community manager for Origin, Marcel Hatam, understands this and on the day of launch, recommended on the official SimCity forums that if players feel let down, they should seek a refund:Įxcept, you can't. The problem is, SimCity is not free-to-play. It's the reality of free-to-play and social games in a connected world.
Publishers push anti-consumer practices such as this on players so they can maintain a sense of control, prevent piracy, and monetize their products. How does one review a game that does not work? How do we objectively review a game that players purchase for their own money that does not work on their own computer unless they connect to EA's service, a service that can end (or not work) at any time? It's an interesting and relevant, if scary, part of the industry now. For obvious reasons, the user scores on Metacritic are as low as can be (see below), and media outlets reviewing the product (service?) don't know how to handle the situation. Players can't sign in or they're getting booted mid-game, the servers were taken down entirely for a period of time, and most unforgivably, players are even losing their progress. Server issues - ones that everyone with common sense predicted - hampered the launch. SimCity launched Tuesday and since that day the game has simply not worked. Here's just a segment of the sort of responses:Īnd every single one of these Redditors was absolutely right. The entire AMA turned into an attack on DRM, generating nothing but bad PR for the game. When Maxis devs took to Reddit for an AMA (Ask Me Anything) two months ago, legions of gamers asked, even begged to make the game playable offline. What if I want to play by myself somewhere without internet? What if the servers go dark? Look what happened to Diablo 3, right? EA didn't listen and they certainly didn't learn and now everyone is suffering for it. Call it what you will, but this form of DRM had a large segment of the fanbase up in arms.
There was one feature which always concerned us though: SimCity only works if you're connected to EA's servers. It seemed to be on the right track to offer a load of new features built upon the GlassBox game engine, while streamlining and improving the best parts of the original games we loved so much. We enjoyed what we saw, finding it fun and promising. At E3 2012 last summer, we had a chance to check out the latest game in development at Maxis, a relaunch of SimCity.
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