Dear Electronic Arts,

My mother always told me that it's petty to say "I told you so" when proven right. That's why I really hope she isn't reading this, because I have a message for you: I told you so.

But it's not just me; a big chunk of the gaming community feels the same way. I don't want this to seem petty, but I genuinely want you to learn from your mistakes, so you don't repeat what's shaping up to be one of the most embarassing game launches in years.

So far, Amazon has 1,091 one-star user reviews for SimCity out of 1,213 reviews total (and I'm pretty sure several of the five-star reviews are being sarcastic). A Change.org petition has raised over 35,000 signatures in two days demanding that you offer a single-player, offline mode in SimCity and eschew always-on online for games. Polygon has revised its score of SimCity increasingly downward from 9.5 to 4. At PCMag, we even came up with seven SimCity alternatives for players who don't want to deal with server problems.

You could have prevented this, if you listened to us. We (gamers, game journalists, tech journalists, and the online community in general) have been warning you about the problems of an always-on multiplayer feature in a game that doesn't inherently have a multiplayer aspect. We talked about Diablo III and its problems at launch, and how the game had a much, much more compelling reason to be online dating back to the early days of Battle.net. We talked about how people like to play SimCity when they have no Internet access, or when they're traveling, or want to revisit a beloved game years from now but are thwarted by server issues.

During a December Reddit AMA with the developers of SimCity, the question of always-on DRM and multiplayer features came up. That became a debacle in and of itself, and thousands of gamers on Reddit alone directly begged for SimCity to have an offline single-player mode. Shortly after, I noted in a lengthy diatribe that these features insult and deter customers. I wrote:

"If a game provides a primarily single-player experience where you build your own city and any online interactivity is optional and limited to social interactions, requiring an Internet connection is insulting. It's EA telling its own customers that it has to hold their hand while they play, for fear that they might steal the game, or cheat, or any of the other usual excuses for DRM and copy protection. EA tries to describe its online features in games like SimCity "services," but they are just disservices: forced, unwanted features that require more than just money from paying customers."

That has been on full display this week. You are doing your customers a disservice, and every bleak prediction about SimCity's launch has come true. People can't get online to play a game they should be able to play offline. And they're getting very, very unhappy.

You probably have some arguments in your defense. The first one is that the servers will stabilize soon, like the Diablo III launch. But the damage has already been done with SimCity, and people who paid you $60 to play a new game have been unable to consistently play that game for almost a week after its launch. It's not unreasonable to expect that a game you purchase is playable when you get home. Furthermore, the fact that servers have been so unstable indicate that you didn't even think this would be a problem, even though everyone watching SimCity's development predicted this months ago.

The second defense is that SimCity has been critically acclaimed. Let me say this straight off: the DRM and online features in a game are part of a game, and while other reviewers might have judged the game entirely based on its city-building mechanics, that doesn't make the other issues disappear. I already noted that Polygon's review has dropped from 9.5 to 4, and the Metacritic and Gamerankings aggregate scores of SimCity have already dropped from the 90s to 70s. The game might have looked great before other people started playing, but the game's warts start to show when the gaming community tries to log into the servers en masse.

I don't want to gloat. I want you to understand why this happened, and how you can prevent it from happening in the future. When concerns are raised over "online features," listen to them. When people warn you months in advance that there will be server issues, listen to them. When gamers worry that they won't be able to play SimCity years from now (when every SimCity game from the Super Nintendo version to SimCity 4 remains playable and enjoyable), listen to them. Turn away from your paranoia regarding piracy and realize that there are tons of customers who want to give you money in exchange for being able to play a game. Appreciate the value of customer loyalty and developing a community instead of squeezing every last drop out of people and discarding them.

Also, a prediction for the future: if you release an expansion or paid DLC to make the extremely small city areas bigger (instead of making it a free fix for one of the game's legitimate mechanical flaws), people are going to be unhappy all over again. We're all expecting it, and none of us are going to appreciate it when it happens.

Sincerely,

Will Greenwald

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