ShamCity: The EA SimCity Disaster

One of the most well known quotes from baseball is Lou Gehrig's retirement speech. He said "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."

That's the kind of feeling I have this week.

Why?

Because a certain very well known online retailer saved me $80 and a ton of frustration this week by cancelling my order for the game by accident.

I ordered SimCity's digital limited edition through this well known online retailer months ago, all filled up with nostalgia about the hours I spent playing SimCity and its sequels.

Then as the months flew by, I started to be concerned. People who participated in the beta decried the small city sizes, the "always-on" DRM connection that had players spending more time staring at a screen while the game decided whether to be playable or not then actually, you know, playing the game.

The word was out.

"Abort! Cancel your copy if you can.. this game is a godawful mess and I don't know if they can fix it."

But, I pressed on. Surely, SimCity is a concept that's simple enough that it can't be so massively screwed up, can it?

EA apparently took this as a challenge.

This is going to be a case study on how not to appeal to an audience.

A game that you cannot play for any length of time due to the servers apparently being made out of paper-maiche. A stiff breeze knocks them down (and remember, without the servers, you cannot play.. not even offline play),

A limited city size that apparently tops out somewhere around 250K. Which is fine, if you want to play Albany County, New York, instead of New York City.

Not to mention the PR fiasco that is an EA Facebook representative answering a question on why there was no servers in Asia for South Koreans (you know, because the ones in America were so laggy and crashing so much) by telling folks that they had put no servers in Asia due to the high rate of piracy there.

So to punish pirates in Asia.. you're going to deny people who actually purchased your game the right to local servers that they have to connect to actually play the game?

The mind absolutely boggles.

How bad is it?

EA has asked its affiliates to stop promoting the game while they try to fix the servers issues. That's right, we're less then a week into the game's release, and they're telling its affiliates "DON'T TELL PEOPLE TO BUY OUR GAME".

Not only that, but they announced Friday night that anyone who purchased a copy of SimCity by March 15th would get a free game from the EA catalog. So the game's so bad and so frustrating, that they have to offer a free game to get suckers, er, customers to buy the game a couple days after release.

Are you kidding me?

So, thank you nameless online retailer, for inadvertently cancelling my digital download order. I owe you one.