10 Obvious Video Game Home Runs That Somehow FAILED

If there's any overarching theme to be gleaned from this article, it's that EA's ability to do itself over is unparalleled in the gaming space. 2013's SimCity was supposed to be a grand modernisation of the seminal city-building series kickstarted in the late '80s. Leading up to release, Maxis Emeryville earned endless praise for its ambitions. Not only did SimCity look the part — finally transitioning to fully 3D environments — but aimed to provide unparalleled immersion via the introduction of multiplayer. City owners were able to establish concrete playgrounds in the same space and co-exist (or the opposite, if you were role-playing a ruthless arsehole) if they so wished,

But looks aren't everything. When the doors opened to the public in 2013, no disaster relief team on the planet could save this digital landscape. Egregious technical issues completely engulfed the post-release conversation. Only fuelling the inevitable hate train headed straight for EA HQ was the revelation that an internet connection was mandatory to play, even if the player wanted to go solo. Not being able to save progress offline and total network outages attributed to server overload resulted in a messy launch that Maxis Emeryville never recovered from, leading to its closure in 2015.