Amazon stopped selling it. EA has shut down their Ads for the game but won't give refunds.
EA Origin has requested to pause all SimCity marketing campaigns temporarily, until further notice. We have deactivated all SimCity text links and creative and we ask you to please remove any copy promoting SimCity from your website for the time-being. To be clear we are continuing to payout commissions on all SimCity sales that are referred, however we are requesting that you please stop actively promoting the game. We will notify you as soon as the SimCity marketing campaigns have been resumed and our promotional links are once again live in the Linkshare interface. We apologize for any inconveniences that this may cause, and we thank you for your cooperation.”
LinkShare is a marketing-affiliate network that connects companies like EA with web outlets that would show text or image ads. If a user then uses one of those ads to buy a product, the website gets a share of the cash.
The plot thickens. Following the enormous rage – that still goes virtually unnoticed and unmentioned in almost all of the financial press covering stories of Electronic Arts, some of which are touting the fact the stock just hit a 52 week high – Amazon has taken the extraordinary step of suspending SimCity 5 digital download purchases from its site, and issued a warning about the EA Game servers. They’ll still let you buy a physical copy if you’d like, but it isn’t playable without working servers. It’s a fairly damning indictment from one of the biggest retail powerhouses on the planet. My suspicions are the refund requests were probably overwhelming so they decided to put their foot down and stave off further problems.
I imagine the financial results of SimCity are going to be amazing because the cash was collected upfront and, under current accounting rules, EA Games should be able to count it all as cash revenue immediately. What will be interesting is what we’ve already discussed – the damage to brand equity. If this debacle causes people to hesitate from buying an EA title in the future, the influence won’t be felt until several years, and titles, in the future.
Good reason to think twice before pre-ording a game.
EA offering free game as apology for 'SimCity' issues
Electronic Arts' launch of the new SimCity game has been plagued by server issues, resulting in everything from features being taken offline to EA calling off some of its promotional efforts for the game. The company hopes to make up for it, however, by offering a free game to users. In a blog post tonight, Maxis' Lucy Bradshaw apologized for the problems, admitting that the game's developers simply underestimated the number of people that would sign online to play the title. "A lot more people logged on than we expected," she writes in the post. "More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta."
As compensation, the company will be offering a free downloadable PC game from EA's portfolio. Registered SimCity owners will be emailed on March 18th with instructions on how to obtain their game of choice.
That's what they get for the 'Always On' shit. I had no interest in the game prior to that anyway but still. To not even offer an offline mode in SimCity is dumb. Unfortunately I doubt EA learned anything. And the people (their customers) who should be pissed off will be mostly placated by a "free game". People need to boycott EA products and stop supporting this evil company.
EA been fucking up with DRM and Always On for years, had it backfire EVERY time, and seem to refuse to learn.
I boycotted them a while back, even went so far as to give Mass Effect 3 a pass because it REQUIRED you to use their shitty Origin system.
"Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich"
I've heard that both Sony and MS are watching this unfold with extreme interest. Hopefully they will drop any idea of forcing always online with their consoles. You see the outrage over a 40$ game like Sim City 5 and you can damn well believe it would straight up murder a console launch if people couldn't play it when they got it home during launch week. Then the problem would have a potential to creep up on every single game released. It's madness. No one wants this shit, they tolerate it at best. Developers are biting the hand that feeds them.
I will never buy Sim City 5 unless it's like, 3$ or less.
If you expect me to pay money for a game that even gets authorised to start from an internet site, it needs to be a site with a financial motive to keep operating long after this particular game is sold. So that would be... Steam, and .... nothing.
May 2003 - "Mission Accomplished"
June 2005 - "The mission isn't easy, and it will not be accomplished overnight"
-- G W Bush, freelance writer for The Daily Show.
Zaelath wrote:If you expect me to pay money for a game that even gets authorised to start from an internet site, it needs to be a site with a financial motive to keep operating long after this particular game is sold. So that would be... Steam, and .... nothing.
Blizzard keeps their properties around
EA, on the other hand, kills things off regularly. Learned that the hard way after playing Motor City Online for awhile and they pulled the plug even though it was doing OK by most standards.
After what EA did to SWTOR I doubt I would ever trust them for anything other than sports games. Then again after how crappy madden is now I doubt I will buy from them again.
Zaelath wrote:If you expect me to pay money for a game that even gets authorised to start from an internet site, it needs to be a site with a financial motive to keep operating long after this particular game is sold. So that would be... Steam, and .... nothing.
Blizzard keeps their properties around
EA, on the other hand, kills things off regularly. Learned that the hard way after playing Motor City Online for awhile and they pulled the plug even though it was doing OK by most standards.
Yup. EA kills their servers a bit too soon for my liking, with very little notice.
M$ might be able to get away with it because the xboxen are so used to shelling out for live gold to get shit that really should be free, and they already have some infrastructure in place.
In all honesty, I would be less unhappy paying them for gold if it meant I didn't have to get off my ass to swap a fucking disc between games. Or IN game. Seriously, fuck that shit, I've been lazy for a long time, and now I'm getting old on top of it.
"There is at least as much need to curb the cruel greed and arrogance of part of the world of capital, to curb the cruel greed and violence of part of the world of labor, as to check a cruel and unhealthy militarism in international relationships." -Theodore Roosevelt
Ever since SimCity launched, there has been a suspicion that the need for the game to always be connected to a server was mainly a form of DRM, not for social game features and multiplayer. Then a Maxis developer came forward to confirm the game doesn’t actually need a server to function, suggesting the information coming out of EA wasn’t the whole truth. Now EA and Maxis have some explaining to do as a modder has managed to get the game running offline indefinitely.
The video above shows the game being played offline. The modder states that this can be done for as long as you like without issues. The only real downside being you can’t save the game because it utilizes cloud saves. However, if you reconnect the game it does save, so you can play all day then just go online to save your progress at the end of a session.
So EA flat out lied but probably nothing will happen.
In a recent poll on Consumerist.com, it was decided that Electronic Arts was the worst company in America. This is the second year in a row that EA has taken the top prize. In response, EA’s COO Peter Moore has released this statement.
The fact that a video game publisher was even in the running for worst company is exactly why those other companies he mentioned get away with that kind of crap.
