Has EA Given Up on SimCity?

Updated:

23 Jun 2017

SimCity, released back in March 2013, was a complete flop. Has EA therefore given up on SimCity?

When EA announced their new instalment to the SimCity franchise, titled just “SimCity” and not “SimCity 5”, we all admittedly got very excited. After the success of SimCity 4, released all the way back in 2003, we knew that SimCity was going to be even better; with better graphics, more details in city planning, and generally even more fun.

Oh, how wrong we were…

The game was a complete flop, which really pains me to say as a hardcore Sim and SimCity fan. First of all, there were network problems, and anybody who decided to buy the game on the release date couldn’t actually play it as EA had made it so that the game could only be played with a working internet connection and not offline.

These terrible network problems were thankfully fixed (although it took them a good six months to do so). However, there was another problem – the areas on which you can build your city are painfully small. Once you fully get into the flow of building a metropolis, you suddenly realise you don’t actually have any more space to carry on building – made even worse if you even have the smallest amount of river, lake or sea in your tiny area.

EA even made a statement about this, and said that they were aware of this problem, but that they, in fact, had no intention on offering an update to give players bigger areas to play on. They argued that the idea was that players are supposed to build lots of small cities which work together.

SimCity’s biggest competitor

Then came along the biggest competitor of the complete fail of a game, Cities Skylines. And it was safe to say that the game, produced by Swedish Paradox Interactive, completely wiped the floor with SimCity.

So after the promising previews followed by the most disastrous release, has EA given up on SimCity? One indication that the company have, indeed, given up on the city-building game is that EA actually surprisingly closed the development studio, Maxis, back in 2015, which was based in Emeryville, California. It was in this studio that SimCity was developed and produced, and also where the beloved game Spore was made. It was also here that The Sims first originated, so it was quite a shock when EA announced this big decision.

But, who knows? There were 10 whole years between the release of SimCity 4 and its unsuccessful successor, SimCity. Maybe some time in the future, EA will decide to grab the bull by the horns again and try and produce another SimCity, learning from all of their mistakes that they had with the disastrous SimCity. I guess only time will tell!