Ditched the game

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Let's see you play the heroic rebel when the question is feeding your family or losing your job (in difficult times with high unemployment figures) over a stupid and - in the overall perspective - utterly unimportant computer game some others would like to play.

 

All this is hypothetical, though - we can only speculate as to who made what decision, and on what grounds.

 

If SC 2013 flops bad then EA could severely punish Maxis, to the point where Maxis could be wound down (terminated or something) by EA. So hundreds of Maxis employees jobs are on the line because of EA's incompetence, Maxis must have known problems like this would occur and I'm sure they are secretly desperate to create a single-player mode but with EA breathing down their backs... I pity those employees and Maxis programmers and developers, I bet for months they knew the launch would be plagued with online problems.

 

This smacks to me of nothing but franchise assassination on EA's part, to release a product that has such a devastating flaw. Besides it's also a matter of psychology to, if SC 2013 were a single player game I would have peace of mind because I know I can save my cities. But with this setup you will always be wondering when you next start up the game if your cities and regions have been properly saved.

 

I'm sorry but how can you purchase a game with that uncertainty lingering around? Me voting with my money is the only way (however small) I can to tell Maxis/EA; SC 2013 needs to have a single player mode before I even think about buying the game again.

 

p.s. I understand exactly how difficult economic conditions are in the USA, 47 million people on foodstamps for Godsake, it's horrific. I am pretty certain if big corporations began to value capitalism and long-term development of their franchises and products, and not be so obsessed with dividends and the value of their stock price, the economy would be on a much sounder footing.

[reputationZed 4]

Let's see you play the heroic rebel when the question is feeding your family or losing your job (in difficult times with high unemployment figures) over a stupid and - in the overall perspective - utterly unimportant computer game some others would like to play.

 

All this is hypothetical, though - we can only speculate as to who made what decision, and on what grounds.

 

If SC 2013 flops bad then EA could severely punish Maxis, to the point where Maxis could be wound down (terminated or something) by EA. So hundreds of Maxis employees jobs are on the line because of EA's incompetence, Maxis must have known problems like this would occur and I'm sure they are secretly desperate to create a single-player mode but with EA breathing down their backs... I pity those employees and Maxis programmers and developers, I bet for months they knew the launch would be plagued with online problems.

 

This smacks to me of nothing but franchise assassination on EA's part, to release a product that has such a devastating flaw. Besides it's also a matter of psychology to, if SC 2013 were a single player game I would have peace of mind because I know I can save my cities. But with this setup you will always be wondering when you next start up the game if your cities and regions have been properly saved.

 

I'm sorry but how can you purchase a game with that uncertainty lingering around? Me voting with my money is the only way (however small) I can to tell Maxis/EA; SC 2013 needs to have a single player mode before I even think about buying the game again.

 

p.s. I understand exactly how difficult economic conditions are in the USA, 47 million people on foodstamps for Godsake, it's horrific. I am pretty certain if big corporations began to value capitalism and long-term development of their franchises and products, and not be so obsessed with dividends and the value of their stock price, the economy would be on a much sounder footing.I'm not giving Maxis a buy on this one. While EA clearly made decisions that were not in the players interest and ultimately lead to core issues with the games playability I feel that Maxis is also at least partly to blame. I can understand why Maxis caved to EA In regards to the always on DRM. EA is the 800lbs gorilla in the room and if they wanted their game published there may have not been any option but to give in to EA's vision even if the devs within Maxis felt it was a bad idea. Where I fault Maxis is in there obsession with social networking. Granted the Sims has been a huge success based on interacting with individual sims and closely tied to social networking. SimCities roots however are in the single player environment and focused on the city as a whole rather than tracking the wants and needs of individual sims. The need to be always connected to a server is only in part a requirement of the always on DRM, regional play is also to blame. So even if EA, and their DRM scheme, were out of the picture, we would still need to connect to the servers to support regional play. My view is that Maxis shares accountability for SC's shortcomings with EA