Can Americans Still Make SimCity?

EA has been concentrating on the quick buck. I think it will be some new console/social media game that may very well have nothing to do with SimCity at all. Hiring at Maxis for console guruzim simply means they are staffing up for a new project.

The only thing EA could do for us would be a set of fixes for the current CTD problems, and that will probably need a thorough debug and recompile, which won't happen because there is not much revenue, if any, in it, just a lot of expense.

When has EA ever made a game on its own that had any longevity? Remember, they acquired the financially failing Maxis just at the critical release time for SC4.

Writing simulations is not very difficult. What is difficult is coordinating a simulation with a graphics system that shows what the simulation is doing. Doing this on a PC, even today, is a major effort. The simulation is not allowed to run free, but must hold itself down to the pace of the frame buffers.

We have all noticed that SC4 gets in trouble when you pass the knee of the simulation curve (an exponential hyperbola by the way) when the number of objects in the simulation becomes large enough. You soon get into mainframe territory as an individual city tile gets very loaded.

A fully debugged expansion pack for SC4 would probably sell well. Just complete a few of the things that were left hanging, remove the My Sims to some kind of outside process and you might be able to make some more money from this old mare and even give it a few more years. The important thing here would be to maintain the plugins interface. A new EP could include the carrying of freight over city boundaries for example. You would have to find a termination for the freight, which could introduce some new destination objects, for example, distribution centers.

if they dont want to do an EP, they should at least allow the community to make one.. an EP could be used as a litmus test for a new game.