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Showing posts from March 10, 2013

EA's failed SimCity launch

If you're not much into gaming, you'll have likely missed this, but EA launched the latest in the SimCity franchise last week, and to say it was a disaster is understating the issue. For the uninitiated, here was Electronic Art's business plan last week: Take $60 from a couple of million gamers, deliver a game that needs to be online all the time to play (even in single-player mode), and only have 6 servers on launch day, meaning almost nobody can play the game they've paid for. Ensure no refunds are given, and ensure that people who for refunds (via bank or credit card chargebacks) get their EA accounts banned. EA already had a bad reputation in videogame circles, but last week cemented their place in gaming history as the worst gaming company in the world. What makes things worse is that when they held their public beta test, they had the same issues of people not being able to play, servers kicking people off, and huge latency making the game unplayable. That was