SimCity sales at 1.6 million since launch
Despite the well documented problems of SimCity when it released, Electronic Arts trumpeted 1.1 million in sales two weeks after launch. Now in its...
Despite the well-documented troubles of SimCity when it released, Electronic Arts trumpeted 1.1 million in sales two weeks after launch. Now in its latest earnings report, the publisher said that number rose to 1.6 million when it's fiscal quarter closed at the end of March, more than half through digital sales.
Those numbers are well ahead of forecast, EA's Frank Gibeau said during the earnings call (via Polygon). Despite the problems at launch, Gibeau said the users continued to buy the game and play as servers stabilized.
"The key takaway here: SimCity is a highly resilient global franchise with a long service life in front of it," he said. "But we learned our lesson and are now building processes to anticipate and service demand. This will not happen again."
Another major update for the game is planned this week.
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replyJohn Keefer posted a new article, SimCity sales at 1.6 million since launch.
Despite the well documented problems of SimCity when it released, Electronic Arts trumpeted 1.1 million in sales two weeks after launch. Now in its...-
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pre-orders perhaps
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Will Wright was at my Alma Mater to give a lecture/keynote and he gave an interview where he was disappoint:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/05/original-simcity-creator-calls-eas-server-problems-inexcusable/-
EA's neither an "evil empire running as one" nor "a loose federation"; it's a mix between the two. There was an overarching mandate to cram DLC and in-game purchases into every boxed game, as Mass Effect 3 and Dead Space 3 so brilliantly demonstrated. And there was the farcical implementation of "always-on SimCity", as proven by the video of the fully disconnected SimCity instance, and in the way that EA used Amazon EC2 as a simple virtual server farm, instead of actually leveraging its "elastic" scaling functionality. Also, they were pumping up the "Medal of Honor" franchise as a Call of Duty killer when it could barely stand up on its own two feet (having DICE prop up the 2010 release, and a Zero Dark Thirty promo DLC tie-in propping up the 2012 release).
What EA seemed like to me was a cabal of businessmen running as fast as they can to milk as much as they can out of this mishmash of wholly owned studios. They tried to create an "ActiZynga" frankenstein, attempting to extract revenue from the best of both worlds, and excelling at neither. And along the way, they hurt studios like BioWare and all the mini-BioWares, Visceral, Danger Close, and what little is left of Maxis at Redwood Shores. Visceral Montreal got shut down before their project released. About the only EA developer that didn't get drastically affected was DICE, since they're the golden goose, and their next project is probably holiday 2013.-
Sigh... just stick with the "evil empire" stereotype and stop pretending you know how EA operates, how decisions are made, or what particular employees' motivations are.
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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I was at that lecture!
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https://twitter.com/mossmouth/status/331640380808384512 derek yu said it the best
people are way too concerned with the always-on controversy. people should be much more concerned with the fact that it's not a very good game-
People were way too concerned with the online only stuff in the first weeks when they couldn't even play the game. After the server stuff was smoothed out and people were able to put some hours into it, the only negatives seen and heard concerned the game itself and the many ways it is broken. And to Maxis' credit, they are patching the game and trying to fix some of that stuff, unfortunately it's never going to be enough. I still think launch features are still absent as well (leaderboards, global market).
Will Wright was just lamenting the fact that it was unplayable initially to all the people that paid for it. And I don't blame him as his name is synonymous with those games. Or was, rather.
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