Impact: We understand that EA is enamored with virtual item sales, as well as the enhanced metrics that come with an always-connected tether. Then there is Maxis’ desire to boost player co-operation and to feed unscripted events to solo players, which are admirable new features for the franchise. But publishers that release a solo-playable PC game that cannot be accessed because of insufficient server capacity, or buggy login code, does so at their own peril. Ubisoft went through this recently, and determined last summer it was more advantageous to abandon its always-connected policy for a one-time only online activation. Ubisoft’s aggrieved customers were so frustrated that many of them felt driven to download offline-enabled cracks of the games they had paid for specifically for a glitch-free experience. Ironically, this was the very behavior that Ubisoft had intended to curtail. Maxis maintains that the online feature options present in SimCity preclude switching off Internet connectivity, even for single-player only sessions.
Regardless, the perspective that has to be pounded home is that once a publisher makes its PCÂ game a connected affair, that title ceases to be a packaged good and becomes a service. Consumers may indeed pay for a lackluster game that they can play or discard at their leisure, but they get justifiably testy when a service throws up roadblocks to accessing the entertainment they paid for. With so many options and platforms to entice gamers, driving them away is not a sound strategy. Kudos to Maxis for the swift reaction in fixing the problems, and we have every expectation that SimCity is a popular enough franchise to overcome this black mark. What befuddles us is why are we still seeing these same launch mistakes repeating themselves within the industry.