The Major SimCity Mistake That Cost EA A Ton Of Money
Electronic Arts has definitely gotten a bad rap over the years. With many players complaining about the company's greed and a class-action lawsuit on its hands, EA has made plenty of missteps. However, nothing compares to the absolute disaster the company went through when it launched SimCity in 2013.
The SimCity franchise was beloved by many gamers for several decades since the series' first entry in 1989. When EA announced a new mainline entry in the series, it really caused a lot of hype because the last major SimCity game was SimCity 4, which released in 2003. With so much riding on this new game, EA needed to make sure it had all its ducks in a row for the game's release. Unfortunately, when SimCity was released, the game was filled with a ton of issues, all of which led to what would be one of the worst launches for EA.
Broken servers created irreversible damage
When SimCity was released, EA required that the game be connected to one of their servers in order to be playable. This meant that even if the player wanted to work alone on their city, they still needed to be connected to the server. This decision sparked backlash from players who were worried that if the servers weren't up to par, it would ruin the experience of the game. EA was fairly confident that this wouldn't be an issue, but that ended up not being the case.
After the game launched, SimCity was plagued with a multitude of server issues. The connection problems became so bad that players who brought the game couldn't even play it for several days. EA tried to remedy the situation by adding more servers for the game, but by then, the damage had already been done. It wasn't until one year after its launch that SimCity would finally get an offline mode. It's a shame, considering that this small mistake more than likely cost a ton of money for the company to fix, and it ruined a beloved franchise.