Simcity's infamous launch failures have made the game a running joke, but despite its bad reputation, the game has managed to hit a brand new landmark, and is also influencing EA's handling of the other franchises in the Sims family. In an interview with Venture Beat, EA Labels president Frank Gibeau spoke about the game, noting that the title has sold over 2 million copies, which he credited to the game's extremely devoted, passionate fanbase.
"In retrospect, our biggest takeaway is that we are lucky that SimCity has an enormous number of loyal fans," said Gibeau. "That first week after launch was really rough - an experience nobody wants to live through again. Since then, we've sold more than 2 million units, and the number of people logging in and playing is holding steady. SimCity is a success. However, underestimating demand in the first month was a major miss. We hope that the game and the service we've provided since then meets the fans' high standards."
Additionally, EA has learned much from the Simcity launch, which saw players unable to play the game because the always-online DRM for the game exhausted EA's servers, and thus players could not access the game. Because of the chaos, EA has decided that the newest edition of the Sims franchise, Sims 4, will not have a similar always-online requirement:
"We listened to the feedback on SimCity and decided that The Sims 4 would be built as a single-player, offline experience. We announced some new intellectual properties at E3 and will unveil more new games in the months ahead."
Gibeau spoke at length about Simcity's launch, and pointed out that, while their problems were much bigger than regular launch hiccups, everyone has various degrees of difficulties when launching a game as big as Simcity:
"Look, launching online games isn't easy - particularly the ones that attract millions of fans on day one. Some of the biggest and best-run companies in our industry have stumbled on this. That's not an excuse. It's just evidence that serving AAA games online is hard. When service is disrupted, you move quickly to fix it and get the players back in their game. You learn from your mistakes and hope you don't make the same ones twice. We analyze our operation to understand where it broke down, and we set new standards so it doesn't happen again."
Look out for more Simcity and Sims 4 news as Simcity continues to get updates and Sims 4 gets closer to release.