EA's 2013 release of Sim City was actually literally eaten alive by its own hype. The online-only City Simulator was so abuzz with positive word-of-mouth that upon release the servers collapsed under the pressure of tens of thousands of players trying to connect simultaneously - leaving no one able to play for what seemed like weeks. It takes a special kind of bumbling to pull that one off, and all of Sim City's positive hype mutated into a negative PR cluster-fruitcake. Amazon ended up pulling the game from their store, reviewers lowered their scores every day the game was unplayable, and damage control resulted in EA giving away several free games (including the offline compatible Sim City 4) to anyone who purchased Sim City (2013) early. By the time the game could be played reliably, any and all buzz generated by the game was null-and-void, to the point where even the recently released expansion pack 'Cities of Tomorrow' didn't get much press. Sim City was also killed by another kind of hype. The hype of the all-mighty cloud that pretty much all technology companies are eager to utilise, regardless of whether internet infrastructure is strong enough worldwide to handle it. Electronic Arts hammered home the fact that Sim City wouldn't be able to exist without the cloud. The hubris of EA and Maxis to believe that 100 percent of the people playing Sim City would be connected to the internet at all times is one thing, but then to completely fumble the ball on DAY ONE is unforgivable. To make matters worse, they eventually released an offline mode patch, thereby proving the whole catastrophe could have been avoided had they not been so eager to use a technology in its infancy simply because they could.
