SimCity 2013
SimCity, the popular city-building simulation game, had a disastrous launch due to its requirement for an "always online" internet connection, even for single-player mode. Players would be booted from the game if their internet or SimCity's servers went down, which happened frequently during the first days and weeks after release. In a recent interview with PC Gamer, some of the game's design team discussed the compromises made during the launch, their causes, and the enormous backlash that followed. Despite the launch issues and compromises, SimCity remains exciting due to its simulation and design philosophy.
EA's Lucy Bradshaw claimed that online connectivity was "a creative game design decision," but it was more likely to be about preventing piracy and driving users to EA's then-new digital storefront, Origin. Librande revealed that "SimCity was one of the most pirated [series] of all time, and so there was a directive to find: 'How can we make this un-piratable?'" One of the ways to achieve this was to keep a lot of the data on the server so that there was nothing to hack, and if players hacked their own copy of the game, they still had to be validated by the servers.
SimCity's creative director, Ocean Quigley, said that "Origin is the storefront in consumers' machines, so the motivation was to make SimCity online and use it to push Origin." However, no one claimed that the "always online" requirement existed to offload part of the simulation to EA's servers for performance reasons, which was another justification EA gave at the time.
Despite the launch issues and compromises, SimCity remains exciting due to its simulation and design philosophy. Librande said, "Cities are people, not buildings. You don't want to think of a city as a collection of buildings and streets. You want to think of it as humans moving through these systems, from place to place."
Shortly after SimCity's release, both Librande and Quigley left Maxis, and EA closed the studio shortly after that. Quigley and another SimCity developer founded a studio called Jellygrade, but they never released anything. Today, Quigley is the creative director at Meta working on VR, and Librande is a designer at Riot Games.
Source: Rock Paper Shotgun