(Don’t forget, “always on” DRM also screws over people who don’t have access to Internet for large periods of time, like rural areas and travelers. Soooo, carrying the pi, we see that EA is already out 5,000 more sales than if they had just created a normal, single player offline capable game with multiplayer components. We’ll say half those people listen to me and haven’t bought the game already. I just told those 50,000 people NOT to buy SimCity because EA cannot handle its s***, and the game is unplayable. I have 160,000 Twitter followers, of whom around 50,000 follow me for gaming. We’ll assume that for an amazingly successful game like SimCity, about 20,000 people will end up pirating it (those who have the technical knowhow and Internet savvy to find a working crack).

Sadly, EA seems to have failed to do some very simple math.

Streaming the other night, the only times I DIDN’T have latency was when I was disconnected from their servers and my computer had to run all the game operations), but in reality it’s to try to combat piracy. The fact that EA requires an “always on” connection is ostensibly because so many operations are taking place server side that your computer won’t be able to handle it (which is a blatant falsehood, since when I was Having access to other players’ cities is cool, but I want to build MY city, and I don’t want some, totally unnecessary “always on” DRM to keep me from playing the game (full disclosure: PC Gamer was kind enough to provide me with a download code for the game, so you can only imagine my rage levels if I had actually put money into EA’s pockets for this “experience”). SimCity is, at its heart, a single player game. EA’s servers are, to put it bluntly, utterly bug, and there’s no option to play the game offline. Of those ten, four consisted of massive latency issues and corrupted games, so (quick calculation here), I’ve had access to the actual game for maybe 10 percent of the time I’ve had it. Of those 62 hours, I’ve been able to log in for around ten. And oh boy, does it hate working.Īt the time of writing this piece, SimCity 5 has been active for almost 62 hours. Unfortunately, the reality did not quite live up to expectations.ĭon’t get me wrong, the game itself is great.

Simcity 5 buy