Hey, remember SimCity? You know, the game with the insane, restrictive DRM that was so difficult to remove, it could have been done by omitting one line of code? The DRM that made it unplayable to all the people who bought it the first week? With time and perspective, EA has looked back and… decided that yep, they’re happy with that.
Why? Well, as they’re EA, you get one guess:
In retrospect, our biggest takeaway is that we are lucky that SimCity has an enormous number of loyal fans. That first week after launch was really rough — an experience nobody wants to live through again. Since then, we’ve sold more than 2 million units, and the number of people logging in and playing is holding steady. SimCity is a success.
So, essentially, EA burned thousands of loyal fans, stoked outrage across the Internet, probably earned themselves the second Golden Turd in a row courtesy of the Consumerist, and, absolutely unsurprisingly, the attitude boils down to “Did it sell? Yes? Then IDGAF.”
In truth, this is hardly a surprise. EA is a company, companies exist to make money, and they make money selling video games. Two million is actually pretty good numbers for a PC exclusive, and probably above EA’s sales targets for the game. They’ll probably never make another SimCity game, after this mess, but so what? What matters to guys like Gibeau is being able to say they sold a lot of copies. Everything else is incidental and dealt with after the quarterly reports are put out.
The lesson to take away here is this: All the complaining on the forums, all the protesting, all the reasoned polite objections don’t mean anything unless they’re backed by people not buying the products in question. So, if you were planning on buying SimCity… well, actually the damage has probably already been done, so you might as well. Just keep this in mind the next time a broken game hits stores.