Why You Shouldn’t Buy the New SimCity

Take a second to look at the above image.  Admire all the beautiful detail.  Reminisce about the countless hours you spent playing previous iterations.  Imagine how much fun this game will be could have been.  For some reason EA (which was recently voted as being the worst company in America) seems to want to use the new SimCity game as the beacon to exemplify everything which is wrong about the company.

To begin with, Origin is needed to play the game.  Every time an EA employee is questioned about this they talk about how you will be able to procure the game through channels outside of Origin. What they don’t like to bring up is the fact that you are stuck using Origin no matter how you purchase the game.  While nothing has been officially announced with regards to Steam, recent history tells us this game will not be available on Steam.  A lot of people are in the Steam camp and would love to see everything released on Steam.  If that isn’t possible the only other desirable option would be to have the game function as a standalone product.  Heck, before Steam was released that’s how everything was anyway:  you buy the game from a retail store, install it, and play it.  Origin is a hot mess which should be avoided until it withers and dies.  Requiring Origin to play the new SimCity is enough for many to immediately lose all interest.

Earlier in the year there was talk about how this new SimCity would require a constant internet connection.  Some of the developers working on the game recently opened up an AMA (ask me anything) thread on reddit.  This topic came up and things went sour pretty fast.  EA likes to spin things to talk about how this is really to everyone’s benefit.  After all, there are so many calculations done in the game that a lot of them have to be offloaded to EA’s servers.  They also talk a lot about how everything is better when you play online anyways.

The simple fact is that this is about control.  EA wants more control over their games, how people play them, and the people who play them.  No one I know has any desire to play this new SimCity game in a multiplayer fashion.  SimCity was always the perfect game for when you’re sitting on a plane, or on some other trip, or when you just feel like firing it up for some good old-fashioned fun.  I guess that’s too much to ask.  The new SimCity will require you to taint your computer with Origin and be a slave to EA servers – but don’t worry, in a couple years EA will shut the servers down leaving everyone who purchased the game no way to ever play it again.