Early this month, Electronic Arts released the newest Sim City for the PC. Taking a page from Diablo 3, Sim City requires an Internet Connection to run as the game allows for players to go online and create their city.
But, like with Diablo 3, something went wrong. The boys at Kotaku started with this message:
Maybe you were hoping to fire it up after a long day of work. Maybe
you've been waiting for this game for years now, and you were psyched to
finally check it out.
Maybe you didn't mind the whole "online
only" thing, because you keep your computer connected to the Internet
99% of the time anyway, and who
really needs to play PC games on an airplane?
So you sat for an hour or two and ate dinner or something as you waited for
SimCity to download and install. When it hit 100%, you were stoked. Finally.
Then... something went wrong.
Maybe the servers just wouldn't authenticate.
Maybe your friends list wouldn't show up.
Maybe you got this message:
The message?
Unable to create your city at this time.
Please claim a city again
It's like a total repeat of the Diablo 3 debacle of 2012. But the next day, it got worse.
If you try to play SimCity on the U.S. servers right now, you probably will. It's a little different from the image we saw last night, and the server issues we saw all throughout yesterday, but the problem remains the same: people who bought SimCity can't play it.
Right
now it's 8pm GMT (Greenwich Mean Time, or 5 hours ahead of Eastern),
and the servers that were supposed to reopen at 7pm GMT are still not
open. It seems like you can play on some European servers at the moment,
although that doesn't help anyone who has already started cities on
regions with their friends on the U.S. servers.
Now as someone who has played Diablo 3, I did encounter a similar problem during the launch date, but it wasn't as severe as this. I think this is what happens when you overhype a game to heck and back.
Finally, players were able to play Sim City, but at the costs of some features that EA had to disable.
We are continuing to do everything we can to address the
server issues. In the meantime, so that we can give you as good an
experience as possible, we are in the process of deploying a hotfix to
all servers. This includes various improvements and also disables a few
non-critical gameplay features (leaderboards, achievements and region
filters). Disabling these features will in no way affect your core
gameplay experience.
We will continue to let you know as we have
more information. We know it has been said before, but we do appreciate
your patience as we complete this latest update. Getting you playing is
our absolute highest priority.
So now players can play Sim City online, only it doesn't feel like online. And with Diablo 3 during its problems, players still had access to Achievements. And the funny thing was, EA promised not to repeat Diablo 3's mistakes when it took a potshot at the game. Here it is, courtesy of Kotaku
But what of the debacle of the
Diablo III launch and the
fury of players who couldn't play a game they wanted to play solo
because Blizzard had trouble keeping its servers up and error-free?
"We've got experience from
Spore and
Darkspore,"
Katserelis said, citing other recent Maxis games. "EA is an on online
company. We're definitely watching what's going on at Blizzard, and
we're putting in backstops and checks to try to prevent those kind of
things from happening."
Yeah that turned out very well.
And as a result, the entire internet community went up in flames over Sim City. Even Jim Sterling of Destructoid ripped into Electronic Arts over blaming the fans for loving Sim City too much
In what has to be the most incredible display of PR spin seen in a
videogame crisis, an Electronic Arts spokesperson has claimed
SimCity's notoriously awful
DRM setbacks are a result of the game being just too gosh-darn enjoyable to quit! No, this isn't an
Onion article.
"What we saw was that players were having such a good time they
didn't want to leave the game, which kept our servers packed and made it
difficult for new players to join," explained senior producer Kip
Katsarelis on
EA's forums.
The remark has already led to
SimCity being renamed to
SpinCity (
thanks to Hollander Cooper!) in celebration of an almost
impressive bit of damage control.
SimCity is now the game too fun to work, and it's all
your fault for wanting to play it so badly.
Amazing.
Amazing indeed. I can't recall if Diablo 3's PR department was like this. But this kind of spin is perfect, if you're a Fox Newscaster.
Although EA promises to fix up Sim City and are giving out free games to those who bought the now-broken online game, the damage was already done and EA CEO John Riccitello resigns in shame.
John Riccitiello, CEO of game publisher Electronic Arts, is stepping down from his position.
Former EA CEO and board chairman Larry Probst will take over while the board searches for a new replacement, EA said.
Riccitiello,
who was first hired as CEO of the massive publisher in 2007, has faced
criticism from investors and fans over the past few years as Electronic
Arts has gone through all sorts of financial difficulties. In December,
Riccitiello
was listed as one of "eight CEOS to fire in 2013" by the blog 24/7 Wall Street.
Riccitiello always portrayed the image of
an exec who actually plays games.
The bosses at Activision or Microsoft wouldn't talk about the games
they played. But Riccitiello would happily chat not just about his
experiences with EA's own but about the competition's. And if you got
him talking about, say, EA's
Mirror's Edge, he'd express
design ideas about how to make it better.
So now that Riccitello is no longer CEO and board chairman of EA, what iwll become of EA as Larry Probst takes over temporarily?
You can read more about the Sim City debacle right
here
Though I wonder if we will learn from the Sim City calamity? Naaaaah. I bet someone could mess it up next. Maybe the next X-Box.
Works Cited:
Kotaku link 1
Kotaku link 2
Kotaku Link 3
Kotaku link 4
Destructoid
Kotaku link 5
