10 Times Publishers Screwed Over A Video Game
3. SimCity
The sixth SimCity game was simply titled SimCity, suggesting it was designed to reboot the series into something fresh. However, unless that something fresh was supposed to be a recently set on fire pile of garbage, it’s safe to say they failed.
It came ten years after SimCity 4 and six years after SimCity Societies, so there was a lot of anticipation. It’s impressive just how quickly SimCity blew all of their momentum. Within a week of the game being released, Amazon suspended sales to limit the amount of customer complaints they were getting.
Bad decisions on a publishing and development level mixed with it being released way before it was ready combined for one of the worst launches ever. EA were forced to issue a statement calling their own decisions ‘dumb’, and offered anyone who had bought the game a freebie from their library to make up for the wrong doing.
The problem was that the game required you to be always online - in itself annoying - but massive server disruption made the game unplayable. Those who’d gotten their hands on it early reviewed it positively, but once it came out reviewers urged players to stay away until it was fixed.