Come to think of it, hasn't Polygon gotten the story first in several of these 'updates'?
Seems kind of weird, reminds me of the earlier 'internal memo'.
Not really surprised, given Polygon's hugely shifting score, that Maxis is reaching out to them. Still seems kind of like a weird spot for Polygon to be in.
I mean, there's giving information to the public, and then there's being an info dump for Maxis'/EA's apologetic soapbox. To be fair, I'm not quite sure where the line is in this instance.
In some cases, yes, we've been first to report on certain SimCity developments. Stories like that internal memo and the embarrassing online marketing withdrawal — I
think — we posted before others.
Was that memo intentionally leaked? I don't know. Orchestrated "leaks" happen fairly often (like some recent "leaks" of prominent first-person shooters) in this industry and others, and Bradshaw's internal memo seems carefully groomed for positive internal and external reception. You'd have to expect at a massive company like EA, they'd count on communication like that escaping the company.
As for Maxis reaching out, we emailed them several requests for interviews with Maxis people. They responded late Friday evening giving us a short turnaround on an email interview. The goal in that interview was to get a better sense of what's happening at Maxis, why they won't offer an offline version of SimCity and how the launch was so incredibly fucked up.
I thought their communication — and complete absence of a human being saying "We're sorry" until that point — was incredibly poor. It seems like EA finally realized that, hence the last-minute availability for an interview paired with the post on EA's website last night.