This year’s installation of SimCity through EA and Maxis has sold 1.1 million copies, making it the largest launch in the series. It’s now the “biggest SimCity launch of all time.”
This is a great moment for EA–or it was, if the March 5th launch hadn’t been so rocky and awful. Customer service has been a stinking pile of… well, stink. Offering a free download of an Origin game is all well and good, but really, how does another game through a terrible service justify the launch of a great game through that same terrible service?
The news has been saturated with how horribly this went for EA, and in the end, I’ll be rooting for them and for Maxis only because SimCity has a wonderful player base, and at its core, is a good game.
But let this be a lesson to the industry and gamers alike–DRM and “always online” concepts are things we seriously need to be keeping an eye on.
