EA offers free game for suffering Sim City players

Written by David Hing

March 11, 2013 | 08:32

Tags: #drm #servers #sim-city

Companies: #ea #maxis

EA has admitted that it has made mistakes with Sim City's servers and is offering players a free game by way of apology.

Writing in a blog post, Maxis label general manager Lucy Bradshaw pinned the server issues that the game has been suffering from during its launch were due to the simple reason that more people logged on than they were expecting compared to the beta.

She also admits that not expecting more people to be playing was 'dumb' and explained that server capacity has been increased with the number of disrupted experiences dropping significantly.

Sim City players who have activated the game by March 18 will receive an email from EA with instructions on how to download a free PC game from the publisher's portfolio.

"I know that's a little contrived - kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We're hoping you won't stay mad and that we'll be friends again when Sim City is running at 100 per cent,' said Bradshaw.

Sim City is the fifth game in city building series, excluding Sim City societies and various spin offs. Launching last week, its requirement for a persistent internet connection in order to run, even in single player modes, led large numbers of its players to be locked out due to server failures.

As a result of the server stability issues, Amazon decided to pull the game from its online store, citing performance issues. EA also removed some features, including leader boards, achievements and region filters, to try and increase stability.

Bradshaw also talked about the possibility of creating an offline-mode for the game, saying "We have no intention of offlining SimCity any time soon but we'll look into that as part of our earning back your trust efforts."

Good Old Games took advantage of the much-talked about server problems the new game was facing and tweeted: [i]'Server problems? DRM-free SimCity 2000 needs no internet to play AND it's only $5.99.'[i]
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