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EA insisted an always-on Internet connection was a sensible security precaution. For a single-player game. The same way it's important to put condoms on your fingers before masturbating. They claimed that the connection was necessary for the game's cloud computation, despite people playing it without. It would have been more convincing if they'd said the servers were their girlfriend who went to a different school. In Atlantis. Which would still have been less of a city-related disaster.

EA required everyone who bought SimCity to connect to official EA servers and were stunned when everyone buying SimCity tried to connect to official EA servers. Those servers reacted like Skynet: destroying every fictional city and telling all the humans to go fuck themselves. The launch was a worse disaster for simulated cities than digitizing Godzilla. Millions of players discovered they'd spent $60 for a four-gigabyte text file saying "Error 37."

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"I have to kill 0.5606 of a Jedi?"

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The only people not suffering problems were those hacking or pirating, meaning the security system had a negative 100 percent effectiveness rate. More than 100, in fact, as many players who'd legally paid for it went on to learn about hacking and modding just so they could play it too. Shortly afterward EA announced an exciting new "offline play" feature, aka that thing they'd claimed was completely impossible, aka "Yes, we've been calling every gamer an idiot for years; thanks for still falling for preorders."