Critic’s Notebook: SimCity From Electronic Arts, Plagued by Server Problems

Like its predecessors, the new SimCity lets players lay down roads; zone homes, businesses and factories; place parks; and provide government services and more to manage a simulated metropolis. Players see their cities primarily from high above and are alerted to citizens’ complaints as traffic clogs roads, schools crowd classrooms, and the fire department ends up a truck short of putting out a blaze.

All of these issues can be fixed through careful, real-time virtual urban planning. Even the tax code can be tweaked from the series’s longtime default “999” tax plan, which, technically, has nothing to do with the former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain.

This type of city management, which can be tedious or stressful in real life, is enjoyable as a video game — if the game works. In the days following Electronic Arts’s early Tuesday release of the PC-only SimCity, the game barely worked, although there were signs of improvement by week’s end.

Lucy Bradshaw, general manager of the Electronic Arts games development studio, Maxis, described the release as “challenging.”

She said that thousands of players had gotten access to the game, though she acknowledged that many others had not.

“Our priority now is to quickly and dramatically increase the number and stability of our servers and, with that, the number of players who can simultaneously access the game,” Ms. Bradshaw said late Thursday by e-mail.

Unlike its predecessors, the new version requires an online connection, even for the private, single-player mode. Electronic Arts’s servers couldn’t handle the immediate influx of players, sticking gamers in queues to wait to play and eventually blocking them altogether.

Hours after the introduction, the company indicated that the problems were affecting “a small percentage of users.” Yet as the situation worsened, the company began to take down servers for maintenance, promising improvements by the end of the week. On Thursday the company turned off “noncritical gameplay features” to ease server load.

Fans fumed. A single, cheerful post on Electronic Arts’s official SimCity Facebook page on Tuesday was greeted by midweek with more than 3,000 mostly irate comments.

“I paid 120 dollars for two copies of the game and cant play either of them,” one commenter wrote before raising his volume to all caps: “DONT SELL A GAME THAT YOU CANNOT HANDLE WHEN WE PLAY!”

A playful poll on that page from a few days before the game’s release asked players to decide how best to supply power to one of the game’s cities — buy coal, harness the wind or import energy from a neighbor. One commenter’s response after the server problems: “the power to allow people to actually play the game.”

To play games is to perhaps unwittingly become a lab rat, often for large corporations. The cheese is the pleasure of a good game. The path to that evolves as publishers concoct new ways to charge for games and adapt to a market that is as unsettled now as music was before Apple decided that songs should cost 99 cents. Creators see their games pirated. They see enthusiasm waning for many $60, 20-hour games as the world falls in love with inexpensive or free ones like Temple Run or Angry Birds. This breeds many economic experiments.

Some games are still sold for a flat $60. Some are free but then cost players dollar upon dollar to unlock extra levels, new costumes or other perks. Some games run on a monthly subscription fee; others cost a dollar.

It’s increasingly common for a $60 game to include a multiplayer component that, if the game is picked up used, won’t work unless the player pays the publisher a one-time fee of $10. Other full-priced games receive a year’s worth of downloadable expansions at $15 or so each. Electronic Arts has tried all of these techniques to reach customers and to get them to pay for these expensive productions.

It is unclear what problem Electronic Arts was trying to solve by requiring SimCity to work only if the computer running it was online and connected to its servers.

The game’s designers have said in the past that the online play would allow the new SimCity to feel more connected. And when it works, it does, transforming the classic experience of laying down roads, managing crime and dealing with air quality into a series of social concerns. Pollution wafts into neighboring cities. Commerce crosses borders. The construction of a hospital or expo center in one player’s city benefits those of neighbors.

Stephen Totilo is the editor in chief of the gaming site kotaku.com.