> I've not heard one person say they are happy about the state of the game.

People rarely take the time to communicate "X is OK." That information is of no use to the person communicating. They're happy with the status quo and don't want any change. So there's little incentive to go out of your way to say that.

Often the only time people will chime in to say "I like X" is when it appears that X may be about to change.

This is a generalization, of course. People do sometimes go out of their way to give praise. This can be out of altruism ("I want others to know how awesome X is" or "I want the people who made X to get more business because they're awesome"). Others enjoy the process of critiquing. Some when confronted with negative feedback feel it's important to do justice by providing an alternate viewpoint.

Nobody says they're happy, yet people keep buying it. You vote with your wallet, but as long as nobody else does, EA doesn't have to care what a few angry people on the Internet think.

The negative blowback didn't hurt this Simcity launch (yet anyway) for a few reasons. First, so many people had pre-ordered it. Second it was massively hyped up by so many of the gaming sites that bow to the big publishers. Third, it's the next version of the game that will take the big hit from this reputation damage (and EA's brand in general).

By the time it was revealed to be a crappy game, inertia had carried the sales a very far distance.

I've seen this concept play out with eg NBA Live. EA produced a few decent versions of it in the early 2000's, and then produced a few really bad versions of it in a row. The first bad version sold fine, then the next releases sold less and less and the reviews were harsher and harsher.

EA had an opportunity to widen its Simcity base, that's a cost you don't see right now. More people than ever before have powerful desktop PC's. Today I can get a great PC for $600 to $800. Ten years ago, that money didn't go nearly as far (and these are less valuable dollars to boot). EA just burned a lot of casual gamers.

There is definitely a cost but it's hard to calculate so it gets ignored. Certainly the rise of indie game developers has been aided in part by the continuing fuck-ups of AAA publishers, though.

I went to the grocery store with my grandma back in 1980's, and she told me she wasn't buying steak because she and everyone she knew where boycotting a manufacturer. That was the first time I heard of the concept. I asked her if it worked and she said yes, they had successfully boycotted several products in the past. I always think of that when I hear talk of boycotting -- that it could work if people were serious about it and actually closed ranks around something.

Of course it could work. Trouble is the gaming community isn't cohesive enough, and the majority of people don't care enough.

I tend to think it's more that the majority of the people buying these games are casual users who will try to play, get frustrated and toss it in a drawer and never complain.

And won't think twice about buying the next one that looks appealing.

it's not that they don't care, but more like there isn't enough of an investment on their part to get worked up about it.

Just about everyone I've heard/talked to about this launch are people who care about gaming and/or game dev.

That only counts for a small fraction of the audience and customer base

A lot of people still refuse to purchase Nestlè products, the scale of that is quite impressive.

As you say in your post, people are buying the game irrespectively. Why bother making changes? Here are the current sales figures in the UK:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2013/mar/11/t...

Debuted at #2 in the charts. Development time costs money, and the game doesn't need 'fixing' to sell any copies. Despite the negative press in the tech community, most gamers don't actuall care about the always online requirement. I don't see the big deal myself either - most PC games from big publishers actually install malware and rootkits onto your machine! That seems infinitely worse than always-online, but no-one cares about that either.

> Why bother making changes?

One that springs to mind is that everybody you burn on this one is potentially a lost customer of the next one.

That's only a concern when continuing your behavior results in a decrease of revenue. EA has been acting like this for a long time. If driving off these kinds of customers was going to create future pain for them, it would have by now.

I posit this is because EA doesn't really have a brand identity per se, but SimCity does.

Agreed. The only reason some people know that EA publishes the Madden games is that it's right in your face when you start ("EA Sports. It's in the game."). Other than that, I doubt many people would even make the connection.

Much of EA's target audience could care less about what they've done to the gaming industry. They don't give a crap about reviews or DRM or always-online gameplay. It's just how their game works.

The SimCity franchise, I'm inclined to believe, is a much smaller, geekier segment of the gaming market, and these broad strokes made from the executives at EA tend to ruffle our feathers considerably more.

In that case, they've been doing this same kind of stuff with their other brands for quite a while and either are ignoring the pain it generates or aren't feeling it.

Some companies are great at ignoring pain until it kills them. I guess we'll see.

Haven't they been been posting pretty shitty quarterly statements for a few years now? They have a lot of money in the bank, so to speak, I'm sure, but it will catch up with them eventually.

Absolutely. I've sworn off the Football Manager series after the debacle that was FM2013. They've abandoned the current edition of their game in a buggy and unfinished state, and now they won't be getting any more of money in the future.

I haven't knowingly bought anything Sony since their rootkit fiasco and subsequent PR mess. I'm sure there's probably some media content I've consumed that came through them - but hardware? Absolutely nothing since 2005.

I dont know anything about the guardians chart here but certainly the charts in shops like Game are not based on any data at all, they're advertising slots, if you pay for the number 1 slot, you get it.

I know this because i had some interaction with a company that checked to make sure retails stores were putting the games in the right shelves that the game companies had paid for.

Anyway, just as a note, this guardian article doesnt provide any data, so it could simply be a paid for placement.

The article cites its source: http://www.chart-track.co.uk/?i=1559&s=1111

I don't see any reason why we would doubt it. Sims is selling cause the real world doesn't care about internet outrage.

Or, many of the people who would see this in a store and be excited might even be aware of the problems until they bring the game home and it bites them in the rear.

Describing an almost complete inability to play the game as "Internet outrage" seems rather glib.

The ability to play is the problem causing the outrage, it is not the outrage itself. It doesn't matter how justified the outrage is if people keep buying it, which they are.

Don't see how glib it is to point out the truth: internet outrage isn't translating to poor sales.

> most PC games from big publishers actually install malware and rootkits onto your machine! That seems infinitely worse than always-online, but no-one cares about that either.

If you define "most gamers" as the people that bought the products you are talking about it is certainly easier to say that those people don't care about those things.

EA doesn't care, they never have.

They will take a game studio, squeeze all the juice out of it and use the profits to buy another one. Ad infinitum.

> http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Electronic_Arts

This is the fundamental problem of the business of making and distributing art, whether it's TV, movies, music, or games. It's not a commodity, it's not, generally speaking, fungible so it takes a much more principled stand to force change. If you don't like, say, the way a certain bank or grocery store or gas company or what-have-you does business you can just switch to a competing product. Even if that requires compromises generally there will be alternatives which are suitable substitutes. But that's not the case with artistic works. There is only one The Beatles, only one Veronica Mars, only one Citizen Cane, and there's only one SimCity series. You can decide to avoid playing the new version, and you can decide to play some other game, but these are all wholly inadequate substitutes.

And this is how game makers and publishers have managed to get away not only with astoundingly bad DRM but also in releasing quite broken and incomplete games in some cases. It's because gamers continue to let them get away with it.

I will say I am happy with the game. I don't think it's delivered on the experience that was being sold, but I'd argue that the potential is there.

The angry mob on reddit fueled by RPS and other places hungry for pageviews has literally killed the last remaining desire I had to read reddit. Some people just don't seem to be grounded in reality and act surprised about things that were known months ago.

The game is fun, it's broken in spots and the launch was poorly done but I'm hopeful they'll fix it. You are 100% right about people ranting about it yet still buying it but we have to keep in mind that even "communities" as big as reddit are only a fraction of the people who actually buy games.

> The angry mob on reddit fueled by RPS and other places hungry for pageviews

This seems to imply that Rock Paper Shotgun is printing sensationalized fluff. I don't think that's a fair characterization at all. As gaming news sites go, I'd say Rock Paper Shotgun is generally pretty thoughtful and reasonable, and thus it's built up a lot of credibility with a lot of people. Is it really being "hungry for pageviews" to report that important statements made about a game's underlying technology are patently false? Because to me that just sounds like good journalism — the kind that the gaming industry could use more of.

A year ago RPS did an interview where they talked about how the simulation was going to be done.

“It’s not like each Sim has a specific job that’s his, and a specific house that’s his,” says lead designer Stone Librande, like this knowledge might mitigate the situation. Instead, each Sim that will inhabit your thriving metropolis (or crime-ridden housing project, as the case may be) will wake up each morning and start the day by looking for a new job – if they’re not sick, that is, in which case they’ll look for a hospital. And every evening, that same Sim will leave work and take a moment to look for a new place to live. Filling out employment applications and being interviewed by already-unbearable roommates every single day. Oh, the humanity!

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03/28/first-look-simcit...

Then when they realize how much everyone hates the game they talk about how the simulation was nothing like they were promised.

These are reports, of course, and we’re not experts when it comes to AI. But what we’re seeing people say is rather than each Sim having a unique life, they’re instead operating on the same sort of systems that control the sewage and traffic. Which seems rude. It also explains why there appear to be lots of rather odd behaviours found in the game, with distribution of jobs, buses, and the like feeling a touch odd.

...

But where it gets even weirder is when their work day is through. They don’t trundle off back to their well-loved home, as you might imagine a Sim would do. They, just as with work, move into the nearest available house. There’s no consistency to their lives, no permanence.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/13/simcitys-sims-don...

I don't think "how much everyone hates it" has anything to do with the reporting, in fact, just like the rest of us, they were probably operating on information provided to them by the developers, and just like the rest of us, are slowly finding out mechanics of the game are not what they were said to be at all.

some people just see what they want to see, though, I suppose.

If you read the comment you replied to, you would see that at least on one occasion, RPS were supplied exactly the same information by developers that they are now complaining about in the final game, seemingly because there are angry mob page views to be had from reddit by feigning indignation.

Eh, that quote from a year ago isn't entirely clear on how they will look for a new job. I'm sure if the implications of the AI behavior were clear then, there would have been at least some raised eyebrows.

It's interesting how much commentary is blind to the segment of the market that is perfectly fine getting dozens of hours of game play for $60.

> I have several friends that picked it up on launch day and a few of them haven't even tried to play it yet

Why not? They won't play the game they already bought because they heard some bad things about it?

https://twitter.com/MaxisGuillaume looks like they're working on fixing a lot of the issues

> Yet EA / Maxis continue to ignore the customers.

As long as quarterly projections are met, who cares if there's a mob with torches outside.