Virtual city planners faced a crisis this week as a plague of server issues kept SimCity 5 gamers from connecting. This meant that building virtual roads, zoning communities, and all other jobs involved in creating a city in the game couldn’t be accomplished. While essentially a single-player game, SimCity 5 requires that players have an Internet connection to play, and apparently the digital land rush after the game was released on Tuesday created problems for publisher Electronic Arts and the game’s developer Maxis.
Steam doesn't require you to connect to the servers every time that you play a game. EA is requiring this, even when you just want to play solo in a SimCity testbed. EA is going in a different direction than other publishers, like Blizzard. For example, we can download Blizzard's latest title Starcraft II Starter Edition for free, and even play it in offline mode. Blizzard requires that you should authenticate with the servers once every 30 days, which is much different than the flawed EA always-online model. Players want to keep playing Starcraft II and pay for the full game because they can participate in meaningful activities with other players.
The real reason you shouldn't buy SimCity 2013 is that EA hates providing online support for its games, as we can see from the Sims 2, a game that no longer exists after 8 years because they got tired of having their servers. The moral of the story is that whatever you create is going to be erased in around 2020 because EA doesn't care about your content.
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Swamped Servers Barricade SimCity From Players
Posted by: Peter Suciu March 7, 2013 03:03 PMVirtual city planners faced a crisis this week as a plague of server issues kept SimCity 5 gamers from connecting. This meant that building virtual roads, zoning communities, and all other jobs involved in creating a city in the game couldn’t be accomplished. While essentially a single-player game, SimCity 5 requires that players have an Internet connection to play, and apparently the digital land rush after the game was released on Tuesday created problems for publisher Electronic Arts and the game’s developer Maxis.
The real reason you shouldn't buy SimCity 2013 is that EA hates providing online support for its games, as we can see from the Sims 2, a game that no longer exists after 8 years because they got tired of having their servers. The moral of the story is that whatever you create is going to be erased in around 2020 because EA doesn't care about your content.