This week was supposed to be a big one for PC gamers as EA’s long-awaited SimCity released, with many members of the media praising the game as it currently stands at an 82 out of 100 on Metacritic. That praise turned into many PC gamers going out and buying the game, which seems like something EA wasn’t exactly expecting as since it’s release, the game has been met with nothing but negativity to both gamers and the media.
The issue EA is having with SimCity is due to the game’s always-on DRM that requires players to always be connected to the Internet when they have the itch to manage their virtual city. It seems way more copies were sold than EA originally anticipated, which is resulting in the company’s servers not working as they would hope they would.
SimCity developer Kip Katsarelis jumped onto the Maxis forums to shed some light on the situation since there are so many angry customers venting their frustrations online. Katsarelis notes the issue is with the server architecture that has players “experiencing bugs and long wait times to enter the servers.” This is something Maxis didn’t expect for SimCity’s launch, so here’s what the team plans to do about this situation:
What we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days which will alleviate many of the ongoing issues. We are also paying close attention to all the bug reports we are receiving from our fans. We’ve already pushed several updates in the last few days. Our live ops team is working 24/7 to resolve issues and ensure that bug fixes roll into the game as quickly as possible.
Hopefully Maxis will deploy those additional servers in time for this weekend as we can’t even imagine what the wait time would be by then without additional servers.