EA Attempts To Launch A Game, Totally Fails

If you haven't seen gaming news lately, you probably might not have heard that industry giant Electronic Arts recently launched the much anticipated SimCity. You might have also not heard that they completely and utterly screwed the pooch on it, so to speak.

A little background on the subject: SimCity, if you don't know, is a widely popular city building simulation game developed by Maxis Studios. It's the most recent game in a franchise that's more then two decades old. EA, which acquired Maxis in 1997, has been publishing their games ever since.

The main problem with the game and it's abysmal launch is a little thing called DRM, or digital rights management. I don't want to get to technical, but basically it means that to play any part of this game, you have to have to be connected to the internet and to EA's servers. A lot of gamers don't like this, mostly because SimCity is considered a single-player game. 

The actually launch of the game was, like many other DRM games, absolutely plagued with issues. EA didn't have the server capacity for that many players and because you need to be connected to their servers to even play the game, many couldn't even begin to play the game. Other issues like data being lost and players being randomly kicked from the servers also plagued the launch.

Basically, this is what was happening to their servers.

Like I said before, players were none to happy about the situation. If you can imagine spending 60 dollars on something and then not being able to use that thing, you can kind of see why they would be unhappy. So unhappy in fact, that they found ways around the DRM requirement. A modder actually found a way into the game's debug mode, which apparently has almost near functionality in an offline mode.

To make matters worse, EA isn't really helping the situation in any way. There have been multiple reports of their customer service not issuing refunds to people and even threatening to ban the accounts of people who do ask for refunds. Now, to be fair, these are just rumors. But given EA's previous track record in these situations, many gamers wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be true.

It's a shame really, as all the reviews of the game are generally positive. EA has said that they plan to add more servers so people can play. Is this issue going to happen with some other big game release? Probably. Is this going to be the future of online gaming? Maybe. Does any developer planning to release a DRM game really need to get their shit together before launch? One can hope.