SimCity, published by EA and developed by the every knowing simulation creator Maxis, decided to launch with an always on server structure that makes people log into accounts before playing the game. Unfortunately the servers the past two days have been a little less than reliable. Errors come in many different waves and flavors when trying to play causing people to get extremely frustrated. The most common error is people just not being able to connect to the servers and being put in large ques. However some of the errors go so far as to lose major progress in the game, delete past cities and causing players to play the tutorial over and over again. The twitter sphere as well as a ton of other social networks seem to be blowing up in anger. All I have to say about all of this is, when are we going to learn?
How many times does a game have to launch, with an always on connection to servers structure, before people just stop being surprised at these troubles. Servers even when beta tested just will never be able to handle the load of day one congestion. It’s unfortunate and it may not even be right, but that’s just the fact of the games industry. The only option for a developer would be to spend way to much money on infrastructure before launch, before they have money for the game, to stock up on servers. I would think that this option would be the best for everyone but if you tried to tell that to someone at EA, Maxis or any other video games engineer they would probably say that spending extra money on servers doesn’t fit into their efficiency model.
Let’s face it, EA, Maxis, and other video game companies only want to to spend the least amount of their money to make sales. I wish that the video game industry was out to make people happy or to give people an emotional experience but in the end it is a business. Right now, on the business side, it doesn’t really matter if the servers are down or not. Diablo III did the same exact thing and showed nobody really cares about these server problems in the long run. Millions of copies of SimCity are going to sell, millions of people are going to play it and nobody is really going to give a sh*t about all of the server problems until next time they happen. And the circle of stupidity will go on and on and on.
Hey, it’s not all bad though. Maybe EA could possibly help us out by fitting in a micro transaction of $100 to get your own server, or all of the pre-ordered versions of the game will get day one server access guaranteed. Gotta love the games industry.
