Polygon's news report of this is hilarious:
No mention that their Reviews Editor also reiterated the same, telling gamers they didn't know what they were talking about.
Well, in all fairness, I doubt they are going to throw Gies under the bus, considering Gies probably edited that article after it was submitted. I wouldn't doubt that he added a few of those sentences himself.
I think it is pretty obvious what we have here. Sim City was created as an online only game. Maxis claims it was to offload all these simulations and calculations into the cloud so they didn't have to be done locally. However, it wasn't too long after release that the gaming community found ways to mod the game so it didn't need to be always online. So all these difficult simulations and calculations being processed in the cloud was really just more PR speak or an excuse for some type of online DRM that many suspected.
Now, 10 months later, sales have started to slow, the DLC may not have made a big splash, and I am sure that EA and Maxis are battling over what to do with these servers. How long do you keep maintaining these online servers for a game that is no longer generating major $$$? You simply dont keep maintaining them. You remove those requirements, say you are doing it for the fans, try to save what face you have left, meanwhile, you no longer have to maintain those servers and can move on to the next game.
All that is going on here is EA and Maxis want to close these servers at some point, and are making those servers unnecessary when they used to be so be so pivitol in how the game was created and was supposed to work, at least in their words.