SimCity Launch Disaster Ends in Free Games
posted Saturday Mar 9, 2013 by Scott Ertz
EA announced SimCity a year ago, and we have been excited about every peek since. We even got to participate in the beta, and it only revved us up for the official launch this week. Well, much like the launch of SimCity 4, which Maxis has apologized for several times during the development process of the new game, the launch went horribly.
The new version of the game has a new, highly intensive feature, where all cities are connected one another, allowing people to visit their friends' cities. While enhancing the overall experience of the game, it does mean that EA needed to be prepared for the highly anticipated launch with A LOT of servers to handle the launch week load. Unfortunately, no one told EA, who seemed to have an incredibly limited number of server clusters, which all failed immediately.
Lucy Bradshaw, General Manager of Maxis, said,
So what went wrong? The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta. OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent. It's working - the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically. The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent.
This is not the first time EA has had a game use game servers - they are a publisher for PlayStation games, so they have setup game servers before. It is both surprising and disappointing that they failed this launch so badly. At least EA recognizes that they failed hard and have offered some sort of reconciliation: a free game from the EA catalog. This should help calm down those who were upset that EA's Origin service does not allow returns of digitally downloaded content.
So, did you get kicked off of a server like we have? Will a free EA title from the catalog make it better? Have you enjoyed the game when you have been able to connect? Let us know in the comments.
