Coll Regan                                             Simcity and EA                                       
                                                   
                                                    http://www.gamesradar.com/ea-your-simcity-broke/
    The recent launch, and subsequent failure of Simcity has shown that even with a large budget, title and even moderately good game that you can still make some decisions that will destroy it.  The game itself seems alright at least, maybe the overall city size is a little small but it really isn't a bad game, the online aspect actually seemed cool, if it was your choice to pick a mode. Instead they EA decided to make the game online only where you have to sign in and join servers to play at any time. This means you can't just play a short bit by yourself, but have to wait and log into servers. They also added the fact that you cannot just save your game and then destroy your city, whatever happens to your town is ongoing and you cannot revert anything.  They have basically destroyed any ability to just mess about with your own land and see how much can blow up, among other things. Now this all by itself sounds pretty bad, but you have to add in the fact that the servers are all having terrible problems.
    The game uses the EA origin servers and these have been going down constantly, In addition to the fact that there were not that many servers so the majority of them are full, which means that you may have to wait for Half an hour to try again. This is unbelievable as how can you expect people to wait 30 minutes or more just to get on their cities to build. Considering the game costs $59.99 it seems odd that they didn't plan out a better server system and also a little ironic, since the game is all about planning and foresight. There has even been mentions from people that their whole cities have been disappearing entirely, apparently this was a regular occurrence pre-release, but it had been promised that it would be dealt with, it appears not.
    Hopefully the apparent failure of Simcity shows EA and other companies that the people don't want to be forced into always being online and they want to do whatever they want to their cities, with being able to reload at any point. This demonstrates that when a company wants to be involved in every aspect of a certain game and restrict consumers because of it that it is a terrible idea and people will not stand for it. No one likes being forced to play a certain way and that is even more important in building games such as Simcity. The problem is that companies will not stop having online DRM and other restrictions so if they do, they should at least be sure that their servers and systems can handle it,  or their games will flop.