This whole saga has just been depressing. SimCity is the franchise that got me into games, then into programming, into CS, into my current career. Will Wright is my fucking hero. He's a legitimate genius and, like Carmack or Miyamoto, one of the few elder statesmen of videogames who deserves the accolades. Hell, I even liked Spore (come at me bros, the procedural technology it created should have been a game-changer--the biggest problem with the game was that it wanted to be a game). But seeing what EA's done to Maxis makes me sick to my stomach.
SimCity used to be something magical, something visionary and special. It wasn't like other single-player games, where you were just playing out someone else's story, or multiplayer ones, which were about direct competition. Playing SimCity, by contrast, was almost like dreaming--a sandbox where you could explore crazy "what ifs" and learn about the world without suffering the real-world consequences of fucking up. That was pretty much Maxis's modus operandi. I'm not saying they weren't a business, because of course they were. I'm not saying they were the only ones making sandbox games, because we all know that's not true either. But if you read up on the early history of the company (and Wright in particular) they were always about a lot more than just maximizing profits. They didn't always succeed (I was never able to get into SimIsle, personally), but they always dreamed big, and when they did succeed they hit it out of the park.
That was back when the Maxis brand was one of the most respected in the industry. Now they're just another cog in the not-terribly-efficient EA machine, spewing out garbage products on the back of nostalgia and overblown hype and hoping nobody notices that there's nothing underneath. I think they are doing long-term, irreparable damage to the games market and the perception of the games industry by the population at large. Next time Congress has a hearing about how terrible video games are, who the fuck is going to have the balls to try to point to SimCity as an example of how amazing they can be? I wouldn't.
And it's not just the DRM, either--between the "social" elements, the number fudging, and the lies about GlassBox, I'm seriously questioning whether anyone left at EA even understands what people want out of SimCity in the first place. SimCity is precisely the sort of game where really amazing underlying core simulation mechanics, AI, scalability, and so on--the engine itself--is way more important than the art, assets, graphics or any sort of online connectivity. The silver lining is that since they fucked up on every single one of those aspects, there's reason to hope that their failure to deliver a proper SimCity title was solely the product of gross incompetence of the highest magnitude, and not an indication that Maxissome EA project managers that happen to be working on SimCity don't understand what makes one of the oldest, most beloved, easiest to explain franchises in all of video games work.
I honestly don't know if EA's bottom line is going to be affected for this particular game, and I'm sure they don't care about me personally at all. But let's suppose for a moment that piracy would have had a huge effect on their sales for this title (I don't really think that's true, since SimCity is one of those games that transcends "normal" gamer culture, but let's pretend). Isn't it worth sacrificing some of those sales to produce dedicated fans of the series? To inspire generations of children to be passionate about games, to become consumers and producers, to educate the masses about how games can be both fun and educational, viscerally satisfying and outlets for creativity? I think so. Clearly, EA doesn't.
