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SimCity sells over 1.1 million copies in two weeks, biggest SimCity launch ever

I

i-Lo

Member
Well this is the case in point of people willing to bitch but not speak with their wallets.

You know who to blame when highly wanted games come with different sets of iron chains: No, not the revered game companies (oh how dare you?). I am sure some deepthroating corporate shillings from some game "journalism" websites and a few other individuals on forums will defend the dev/publishers' honour. The blame rather has to befall the darn OCD that just make people buy these games.
 
P

Pyronite

Member
That... doesn't seem like all that much. I bet they were expecting higher, and I wouldn't be surprised if that played into John Riccitiello's decision/pressure to step down.

I realize it's the highest launch yet, but times have changed.
 
K

Kill Your Masters

Member
KKRT00 said:
Wish SimCity to fail, complain about too many shooters or corridor action games on the market = GAF
Click to expand...

I only wish anti-consumer broken games to fail, regardless of genre.

I'll rather have an well polished space marine shooter without anti-consumer DRM instead of drm-filled broken artsy games.
 
J

J-Rod

Member
Way to teach them a lesson. I'm sure they are weeping over their decision to make it online only with 1.1 million copies sold.
 
C

chickdigger802

Banned
Hmmm I enjoyed the game when I started, but the more I played, the less I enjoyed.

Curious what the average opinion of the game is for non forum dwellers. Simcity was never really a casual experience, and most of the faults with the gameplay are pretty obvious just a few hours in.

This whole experience though made me realize how awesome amazon is. Full refund for an opened retail box of sim city.

If I ever do something stupid like preorder a game again, it's gonna be through amazon.
 
T

TedNindo

Member
Wouldn't this mostly be a gaming journalism failure? The game didn't get bad reviews or previews. The only negativity about the game started when the servers were down and people couldn't connect. At that point Everyone started picking at the game like vultures at a carcass.

And the game still isn't bad. There are far worse sequels out there that didn't get this reaction.

This is about much more then this game it seems. Or everyone, atleast a lot of gamers over the whole net, is REALLY passionate about SimCity. But I guess they aren't because a lot what is wrong with the actual game itself can still be fixed or not as bad a people are making it out to be.
 
T

TheNamelessOne

Member
TedNindo said:
Wouldn't this mostly be a gaming journalism failure? The game didn't get bad reviews or previous. The only negativity about the game started when the servers were down and people couldn't connect. At that point Everyone started picking at the game like vultures at a carcass.

And the game still isn't bad. There are far worse sequels out there that didn't get this reaction.

This is about much more then this game it seems. Or everyone, atleast a lot of gamers over the whole net, is REALLY passionate about SimCity. But I guess they aren't because a lot that is wrong with the actual game itself can stil be fixed.
Click to expand...

Yes. This is not about the game. This is about two things:

Publishers being disrespectful and anti-consumer, all while lying through their teeth when getting caught with their pants down.

Gaming "journalism" and all the problems that comes with it like threats about sanctions if review score is not high enough, "reviewers" being affiliated with developers - and last but not least; "reviewers" not reviewing games, but act as advertisers.
 
K

KKRT00

Member
Hellraizer said:
I only wish anti-consumer broken games to fail, regardless of genre.

I'll rather have an well polished space marine shooter without anti-consumer DRM instead of drm-filled broken artsy games.
Click to expand...

If game fails in niche genre, developer is closed and indies do not want to try to cater to this genre, because it seems that there is no audience, bigger publisher wont even touch this genre for next 5-10 years.
If game in niche genre is successful, but there is big backslash about quality and consumers are not satisfied, indie games, from this genre, get more profits and coverage, and other companies from bigger publisher get green-lighted theirs projects.

I'm talking out of my ass? Nope, look Diablo 3 and other grow of other aRPG games like Marvel/Grimdawn/Torchlight 2/Path of Exile.

Go on, complain about Simcity being successful financially, it will so help industry.
 
H

Htown

STOP SHITTING ON MY MOTHER'S HEADSTONE
Everything is intelligently simulated in this new SimCity, from all of the Sims in a city, to every kilowatt of power pulsing through a region thanks to the powerful GlassBox Engine. It is the most expansive city management game yet where multi-city gameplay across regions delivers a larger playing field. No longer are players relegated to playing one single city, now they can manage and play up to 16 cities at once. Each city can have different specializations; they can share services and trade resources; they can help or even hinder each other; every decision a player makes in each city has impact in the broader region. It’s up to the player to decide where and how they play.
Click to expand...

woooooooow

dat fuckin spin
 
K

Kill Your Masters

Member
KKRT00 said:
So go on, complain about this game to be successful financially, it will so help industry.
Click to expand...
I'm not here to help the industry, the industry is not a charity.

But neither is EA helping. They are here to suck out all your money and that's all they care about.

As soon as publishers like EA figure out why exactly their anti-consumer strategies lead to being the 'worst company in america', the industry could get better.

I will never support this crap no matter how niche a game is. Sucks for games like SimCity if they die out, but the blame will be all on the publishers for shitting on the fanbase.
 
T

The Crimson Kid

what are you waiting for
These sales numbers aren't surprising at all. SimCity has been one of the biggest brands in gaming and has cross-generational appeal on a scale that only a few other brands in gaming have. The power and general awareness of the Sim and SimCity brand is on the highest tier there is, sharing company with Blizzard's titles, Half-Life, and Call of Duty in the PC space, and the Sim brand arguably has bigger and broader mindshare than any other game out there. The fact that SimCity sold over a million in the first week, which is a feat only reserved on PC for The Sims, Blizzard, and Valve games and for Call of Duty, Madden, Halo, and Mario games on consoles, proves that the brand has such a massive and broad appeal.

With such a powerful and revered brand that has been around for decades, a new game in the series will attract many people who aren't regular gamers but will pick up a new game in a franchise they had fond memories of in the past. With new games in these massively recognized and revered series that can attract a much wider audience, most of these casual/intermittent gamers won't be doing any research on the product or looking for news about it because that's just something they don't do for games. A fact of life is that most people don't research or look into things that don't directly affect them or interest them greatly.

I can all but guarantee everyone that the vast majority of purchasers of SimCity are these casual/intermittent gamers that know very little about the new SimCity except that it is a new SimCity.

If The Sims 4 came out with always online DRM while filled with micro transactions and the core gameplay was a order of magnitude more broken than the new SimCity, it would still sell millions of copies in the first month.

Whether SimCity will have strong sales in the future or what the poor quality of SimCity means for the success of a sequel remain to be seen, but it is no surprise that a brand as strong as SimCity is will see huge sales out of the gate.

Steve Youngblood said:
I think sentiments like this are often wildly off the mark when it carries with it the implication that consumers who are spending $50 - $60 on a diversion that they intend to play as a means of having fun when they have free time carries with it some sort of moral implication to be informed. Now, granted, there can be some extenuating circumstances where I would suggest that people would be better served to care a little bit more about how the product is made. For instance, "I just want to have fun playing a video game" becomes a less compelling rationale if I explain to you that the game was coded by starving children in sweat shop conditions, just as an absurd example.

However, lamenting that the uninformed consumer let me down because they didn't research the DRM of a game they wanted to play -- an anti-piracy mechanism that I find egregious -- just strikes me as unnecessarily elitist. The ire should be directed first at the company that implemented the DRM and then failed to make sure that everything was up to snuff, not at consumers who just wanted to spend money on a video game because they hoped they'd have fun.
Click to expand...

Bingo, even though you were a bit harsh to Derrick there. Going straight for the jugular and all. After all, we both know that if you took the unnecessary elitism from Derrick, there wouldn't be much of anything left. :p

With a franchise with such a strong brand appeal that spans several decades, EA has attracted many intermittent gamers who don't follow games at all based entirely on the strength of the brand. It is outright insane to expect hundreds of thousands of people who don't follow the games industry at all and only game once in a while to all go read a bunch of previews and dig through forums to figure out what's going on with the new SimCity. Especially in a world where the game is still the #1 PC game on Amazon despite the warning on the game page and the 1-star average user review score.

While it would certainly be nice to live in a world where everyone went out of their way to perfectly inform themselves before every purchase, that isn't the case by a long shot, especially with a product that attracts so many purchasers that don't play games all that often, which means that they devote little mindshare and effort to games (and much much less to doing research about them).
 
J

Jac_Solar

Member
But how many people got a free game because of this? And what were the choices? If they were somewhat new games, and every single player got a new game, wouldn't this be bad since they'd overall lose a lot of sales?
 
Teletraan1

Teletraan1

Banned
meh, I just wanted a new Sim City game. I don't feel the need for making a stand or any other bullshit because that generally wont work. Publishers wont know why a game was not purchased when you vote with your wallets and taking a stand on a niche title like a city builder wont show anyone anything. The only message received would have been "oh people don't like city builder games anymore, next Sim City is a shooter then." not that the DRM is ill received.

That said, this launch has been horrible. The game is not as deep as the previous games and I should have known that from the scope of the cities. The pre-release info on this game was mostly a lie since it was supposed to have a more intense simulation going on than previous games and that didn't really pan out.
 
IrishNinja

IrishNinja

Member
ive been outta the loop & don't know the names of the EA plants here, so i just wanna blame metalmurphy for much of this somehow
 
P

Palette Swap

Member
KKRT00 said:
I'm talking out of my ass? Nope, look Diablo 3 and other grow of other aRPG games like Marvel/Grimdawn/Torchlight 2/Path of Exile.
Click to expand...
Yes you are. You're totally reversing causality here.

If anything, TL2 was successful because it was perceived as addressing D3's shortcomings. It's not like people waited for D3 to release, said "well, there's a market there, let's make Torchlight 2 in 3 months".

Your whole argument rests on the notion that people should buy a game of a given genre to support it because otherwise, that genre will disappear and we'll only have corridor shooters. Have you looked at the new PC releases in the last 3 years? Sure, there's a load of shooters but there's a load of variety too. I mean, everyone is enamored with a fucking truck simulation.

Your argument would hold more water on the console side but SC is a PC game.
 
T

TedNindo

Member
Sim City games tend to have really long legs. Like most PC tittles used to have btw.
So you guys have ZERO reasons to complain. The effects of what went down at the launch of this game and the peoples reaction to it have yet to become noticeable.
 
thelurkinghorror

thelurkinghorror

Member
KKRT00 said:
If game fails in niche genre, developer is closed and indies do not want to try to cater to this genre, because it seems that there is no audience, bigger publisher wont even touch this genre for next 5-10 years.
If game in niche genre is successful, but there is big backslash about quality and consumers are not satisfied, indie games, from this genre, get more profits and coverage, and other companies from bigger publisher get green-lighted theirs projects.

I'm talking out of my ass? Nope, look Diablo 3 and other grow of other aRPG games like Marvel/Grimdawn/Torchlight 2/Path of Exile.

Go on, complain about Simcity being successful financially, it will so help industry.
Click to expand...

What gaf help perpetrate is a sort of character assassination, something very very very bad to do. They think this is the way you do boycott but is not.

The game is flawed but also a joy to play, and from now on can only grow.
 
-tetsuo-

-tetsuo-

Unlimited Capacity
Is there an instance where "gamers making a stand" has worked? Ever? I remember the Modern Warfare 2 situation and, well, that didn't really work.
 
B

BolognaSoup

Member
I think SimCity transcends the people that are "paying attention." I think they still lost a lot of sales with the stupid design of the game and its brokenness to the people that were paying attention and then going forward to the negative word of mouth of the people surprised/angry about it.

What would these numbers be if the game wasn't broken and bad in general?
 
Risible

Risible

Member
The blame for this can be laid directly at the feet of sites like Polygon. Their gushing, hyperbolic review helped set the stage for that all-important release-week push. They should be ashamed of themselves. "Changing the face of games journalism", indeed.
 
A

Almighty

Member
_tetsuo_ said:
Is there an instance where "gamers making a stand" has worked? Ever? I remember the Modern Warfare 2 situation and, well, that didn't really work.
Click to expand...

From what I remember it has worked for PC gamers. Made a lot of publishers drop Starforce many years ago and more recently made Ubisoft tone down its own DRM. Even with that said for something as big as CoD or Diablo 3 yeah never. Even if every core gamer didn't buy the game they would be out numbered 10 to 1 by the millions who never heard of or don't care about what ever the issue is. Voting with you wallet only really works for smaller titles.
 
P

PedroLumpy

Member
Isn't the backlash more likely to hit them on the next time round anyway? I don't think one shitty game is enough to kill a brand like Simcity.
 
B

Beautifully Shaped Monsters

Member
I bought it, and I haven't tocuhed it for almost a week. The game is fundamentally broken and simply not very fun. It's too easy to build out a maximised town and then you have nowhere to go. They made it extra easy to compensate for the incredbly stupid AI, so there is no longevity. All that's left it to try and break the mechanics in as many ways as possible.

I guess I'm part of the problem, but I was so excited for a new Simcity that I was kinda blind to all the pre-launch warning signs...

Ah well; fool me once, shame on you, fool me 7 times or more...
 
D

dmr87

Member


Beautifully Shaped Monsters said:
I bought it, and I haven't tocuhed it for almost a week. The game is fundamentally broken and simply not very fun. It's too easy to build out a maximised town and then you have nowhere to go. They made it extra easy to compensate for the incredbly stupid AI, so there is no longevity. All that's left it to try and break the mechanics in as many ways as possible.

I guess I'm part of the problem, but I was so excited for a new Simcity that I was kinda blind to all the pre-launch warning signs...

Ah well; fool me once, shame on you, fool me 7 times or more...
Click to expand...

Don't worry, you're not alone.
 
R

Raide

Member
Despite its major issues, the game is actually pretty fun. Would like to see EA/Maxis address and update some of the more fundamental issues, else I will get bored in a few weeks.
 
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