Since the game’s launch in March, SimCity has sold over 1.6 million copies so far, even despite the fiasco that erupted during launch. EA says that half of these sales were from digital downloads, meaning that 800,000 copies of the game were sold through EA’s Origin gaming service alone, which is quite impressive.

As for other games that EA highlights, FIFA 13 has sold over 14.5 million copies in EA’s fiscal year 2013 so far, and EA says that Battlefield 3 Premium has over 3.5 million subscribers to date. As for the company’s latest iOS game, Real Racing 3 has seen more than 30 million downloads, and has been averaging over 2.5 million daily active users since its launch.

Despite all the hate that EA has been getting lately, including its “Worst Company in America” award for the second straight year, EA claims that they were the number one publisher in “Western retail markets” during the past quarter, as well as the number one publisher in the world when it comes to iOS games. Sales speak for themselves, we suppose.

However, when speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Wright says that he “feels bad for the team,” but predicted that there would most likely be some backlash based around DRM issues and complaints. Wright says that the launch fiasco was “basically inexcusable,” and paying $60 for game that you can’t play it will obviously cause a lot of outrage, and Wright certainly understands that.

Then again, Wright says that the new game is “good,” and he enjoys “playing it a lot,” but the launch was pretty much a disaster for Electronic Arts. Even if the game publisher finally fixed all the issues with the game, the memory is still there of the time that you couldn’t access the game that you paid big money for.

In a slightly-related note, Electronic Arts will be sending out an update for SimCity sometime this week that will address a handful of issues. The update tweaks traffic routing, phantom air pollution, stuck school buses, and stuck university students crossing roads. Other updates include a slew of new items, as well as some audio fixes.

[via GamesIndustry.biz]

Electronic Arts has announced that the update will hit on Monday starting at 1 pm PT and will bring the game to version 2.0. It contains “a number of top-requested bug fixes and improvements,” but the publisher was kind enough to provide a massive list of everything that will be provided in the update.

Some of the more important updates address issues with tourists, delays in receiving invitations, and phantom audio problems. It will also provide color-corrects when in a colorblind mode in the HUD, and data maps will show the filtered color when a color filter is enabled, unless you’re in a colorblind mode.

Other than that, casinos will be more profitable, and there will be a slew of fixes to the game’s budget-based systems, including fire, garbage, and sewage. Public transit will also see a number of improvements, including a fix for that annoying infinite loop problem that some players have been experiencing.

The launch of SimCity for Mac will come a bit later than EA hoped for. Originally, the game was set for a “spring 2013″ launch, but June 11 is technically during the summer. Either way, Mac users will finally be able to build the city of their dreams starting in just a couple of months. They shouldn’t have any problems either, since EA has finished upgrading their servers.

The game got off to a miserable start, with the midnight release not going as planned. Gamers who pre-ordered weren’t able to download their digital copy of the game, and even if gamers were able to download and install it, they were met with a bevy of server errors that deemed the game unplayable at first.

It became so bad that Amazon had to suspend sales of the game, and Electronic Arts told affiliates to “stop actively promoting” the game until the issues have been fixed. Of course, the game publisher tried to make things right with gamers, by offering them a free game for their troubles, but we’re not sure if that did the trick, since EA was recently voted the “worst company in America.”

The list of games that you can choose from includes Battlefield 3, Bejeweled 3, Dead Space 3, Mass Effect 3, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Need For Speed Most Wanted, Plants vs. Zombies, and SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition. A free copy of SimCity 4 seems mighty enticing, especially considering all the madness that we’ve seen with the newest installment.

NOTE: See our [EA Games tag hub] for more!

North American players will have access to pick their free game by the afternoon on March 20, and European players will be granted access a day later. Asia and South America will have access on March 22. The games will be available through EA’s Origin digital distributing service. You must register your copy of SimCity before you’ll be eligible for a free game.

Overall, you won’t get to pick any game you want, but EA has picked out a few gems here. However, we’re sort of baffled as to why they’ve included a couple of PopCap games in the list, especially when you can choose Battlefield 3 or even Mass Effect 3, but I suppose that those gamers who are yearning to defend their house from zombies have a chance to do so at no cost.

Bradshaw explained that they envisioned a game where cities would constantly be up to date. Players would be able to help each other out with supplies and services, send gifts to each other, promote trading in the Global Marketplace, and more. Simply, they wanted players to always be connected to each other. Even if players wanted to play alone, Bradshaw stated that they’d eventually want to play with other players.

Now here’s the part where everyone gets pissed off. Bradshaw says, “So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision.” Essentially, SimCity could have operated with both an online multiplayer mode, as well as a single-player mode that many of the series’s fans asked for. Bradshaw justifies her case by saying that there are “thousands” of people who love SimCity’s always-connected feature, a statement that has been debunked by thousands and thousands of other fans.

Obviously Bradshaw’s statement drew in a huge list of angry SimCity gamers. Many came out to call Bradshaw and the SimCity developers liars. They commented on how the “always up-to-date” trading services sometimes take up to an hour to update, and how even online saving is unreliable, with many players losing multiple cities due to an error in the cloud-based servers. The SimCity launch was a massive failure due to the Always-On DRM, and EA has experienced continuous PR damage since then. This may be the last nail in the coffin for the SimCity series.

[via EA]

In a blog post, EA detailed some of the changes and upgrades they made throughout the week, including the completion of migrating all of their original servers to the new, faster and higher capacity servers. However, while the migration is complete, EA says that they’ll continue to provide “ongoing optimizations” for the servers.

EA also launched a server status page, so that gamers could see the status of server operations from around the world. EA says these are updated live. The page will list whether a server is available for play, or if its full. Servers that are experiencing high volume will be marked with yellow. However, most of the servers are currently green at the moment, which means they’re available.

Last but not least, EA released patch 1.5, which addresses “some trade intermittency issues.”EA says this should make regional interaction more responsive, and the publisher is going to continue to improve the speed between cities within a region. The patch should also decrease the chance of losing progress on your city via a rollback.

When you’re creating a video game that’s released to the public, there’s always a moment of panic – or heart-clobbering anticipation when the final software build has hit the market. When that moment is over, you’re generally allowed to sit back and watch the sales numbers grow (or pan) while you take a much-needed rest.

For the creators of the 2013 edition of SimCity, there was just about enough time to have a glass of lemonade before they were struck with a spit-take at customer complaints across the board. As the game is based largely online, connectivity problems reported by customers from across the country were not a welcome wake-up call for this game’s creators.

The good news is that all is nearly well at this point, with “tens of thousands of new players” joining the game every day according to Bradshaw. She’s spoken up on how humbling it’s been to see the amount of confidence the gaming community has shown in the developers behind the game given the problems it’s had thus far, and has thanked the public endlessly for that faith.

Our biggest fear was that people who love this franchise would be scared off by bad reviews about the connectivity issues.

But you put your faith in us.  You bought the game with the understanding that we’d quickly fix the server issues.  For that support – that incredible commitment from our fans — we are deeply grateful.  As the general manager of Maxis, I want you to know that we cherish your faith in us, and the love you’ve shown for this franchise.

Thank you very much.

Have a peek at the timeline below to see the whole SimCity 2013 story as it’s rolled out over the past week and be sure to let us know how your experience is when you pick the game up yourself this week!

[via EA Games]

Bradshaw stated that SimCity is seeing major improvements. She said that they have improved their server response time by up to 40 times, doubled the amount of players in-game, and have reduced the amount of server down times. They are also rolling out new servers and replacing their old servers so that more people will be able to maintain a stable connection to the game. However, because they’re replacing the old servers, you may see some downtime in the near future.

Also mentioned by SimCity through its Official Twitter is the possibility of there being an offline mode in the future. While it won’t happen anytime soon, it may be implemented in the future. The tweet says, “We have no intention of offlining SimCity any time soon but we’ll look into that as part of our earning back your trust efforts.”

SimCity will begin updating its servers today during the evening. This is great news for those of you who have the SimCity game and weren’t able to refund it for your money back. Players will be updated through the EA forums as well as through the game launcher about pending updates. Also for those of you playing SimCity, you will also receive a free game from EA beginning on March 18th. We’re still not sure whether or not you’re allow to choose which game you get for free, or if it’s going to be a selected by EA themselves.

[via SimCity]

Lucy Bradshaw, the General Manager of the EA Maxis Label, released an update to players about the stability issues with the game. So what was the issue? There were a lot more people logging in and playing the game than they had expected. She stated, “A lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in beta.” In order to remedy this problem, EA is increasing their server capacities. So far they have increased their servers’ capacity by 120% in the past 48 hours.

In order to ease the outrage from the SimCity community, Bradshaw has informed all SimCity gamers (who have activated their game) that on March 18th, they will receive an e-mail that will allow them to redeem a free game from the EA store. She didn’t release any more details about the “free game”, but we’re hoping it’s not just some $5 piece of junk that no one would want in the first place.

EA will be working to improve SimCity’s stability all throughout the weekend. This game had similar (albeit worse) launch issues like Diablo 3, a game that also requires you to login to an online server to play. Diablo 3 was down for hours while Blizzard was working on its servers. Hopefully EA’s free game will be able to win back the hearts of all of the gamers it angered. Now it just has to work on those 1700 1-Star Amazon reviews.

[via EA Games]

EA plans to resume their marketing and promotional efforts at some point, though, mentioning in the email that they will notify affiliates when they can start promoting the game again. However, EA says they will still “payout commissions on all SimCity sales that are referred,” which is certainly good news for affiliates still.

SimCity launched earlier this week, and it didn’t quite go as planned. Of course, no one can really plan for how a launch will go, but we’re sure Electronic Arts wasn’t expecting this much backlash and issues. It turns out demand of the new game was higher than expected, resulting in server crashes and downloading failures for gamers.

Amazon even ended up suspending digital orders of the game, while still allowing physical copies to be sold with an asterisk in hopes to temporarily cut down on the amount of gamers with access to the game and hopefully help out EA with the surge of those hankering to build their dream city. In the meantime, feel free to contribute to the Kickstarter campaign for Civitas, a cheaper DRM-free alternative to SimCity.

[via Polygon]

The developers are looking to create a DRM-free version of SimCity, with the ability to play the game completely while offline, something that SimCity doesn’t offer, and it’s the one feature that’s currently causing all of the problems. Plus, the game will only cost $15, at least if you back the project on Kickstarter right now.

Of course, the folks behind the project weren’t afraid to call out EA on their Kickstarter page, claiming that EA is “forcing the worst form of draconian DRM on its players.” Those are certainly some fightin’ words, but it seems the developers are confident that Civitas will be an excellent alternative to EA’s city-building offering.

Of course, the game will go into beta first for a few months, and you can join in on the beta fun by pledging $10 more on top of the $15 price of the game, which still isn’t a bad price at all, even if you didn’t get access to the beta. However, we’ll have to wait and see if the game can live up to its own expectations. So far, the project has raised almost $37,000 at the time of this writing, and they’re looking to raise $250,000 total, but there’s 24 days to go, so it can be easily achieved.

[via Kotaku]

Amazon is still selling the physical boxed version of SimCity, however, but they’re attaching a saying that servers have been experiencing issues and there’s currently no timeframe on when the issues will be fixed. Unsurprisingly, disgruntled SimCity gamers have taken to Amazon by giving 1-star ratings to the game, and there are well over 800 ratings currently attached.

That’s definitely not good news to prospective buyers, as they could see the 1-star rating and immediately turn away, but considering the fact that gamers can’t even buy the digital download version of the game makes up gamers’ minds for them. Currently, there’s no information as for when Amazon will begin selling the digital version again.

The game launched at midnight on Tuesday morning, but gamers were met with download failures and slow connections. Even EA’s Origin gaming service wasn’t able to distribute all the digital copies that were pre-ordered, and instead had to slowly roll them out. Some users were even reporting that after the game downloaded, they couldn’t even connect to the servers to play the game.

[via The Verge]

However, the launch isn’t going as well as Electronic Arts and Maxis have hoped. Many users have been experiencing download failures, and not everyone was able to play the game when it was released at midnight. EA’s Origin said that because of heavy traffic, they’re having to slowly roll out the game to its users.

It turns out that due to the server load, it was expected that downloading the new game could take up to three hours, according to Origin. It’s also said that those who pre-ordered the game are having issues with the game unlocking for them, while those who go in and buy the game right now are able to unlock it right away.

According to Origin’s timeline, everyone who pre-ordered SimCity, should now have it unlocked for them. Overall, it seems like a nightmare of Electronic Arts, while it’s merely just a nuisance for gamers who want to play the game. Origin hasn’t updated their Twitter feed for eight hours now, so we’re guessing that most of the problems have been solved.

This second beta will feature an “enhanced version” of the one-hour slice of gameplay that was previously featured in the first beta, although we’re not sure what “enhanced” features we’ll be seeing this time around. However, you can bet that gamers will be seeing a bit more this time around, as opposed to what they saw last month.

Furthermore, Maxis also unveiled a new trailer showing off the Limited Edition version of SimCity, and if you pre-order it, you’ll get the Heroes and Villains expansion pack for free. The expansion pack, which is only compatible with the Limited Edition version of the game, allows you to add organized crime and superheroes to your city, so who knows, maybe you’ll create the next Gotham City?

SimCity will officially be released for Windows in North America on March 5 and in Europe on March 7. A Mac version will also be coming to stores as well, but it won’t hit shelves until the spring. Cross-platform play will be supported with the game, so you’ll be able to play against your friends using different platforms.

The reason for the delay, according to Maxis, is that the Mac port isn’t a port at all, but a “full native version” specifically for OS X. This means that the team will be making sure that Mac players get the same experience as Windows players. However, one of the key differences is that the Mac version will be a digital download only.

As far as minimum spec requirements are concerned, Maxis didn’t give any concrete details on how much power is required out of your Mac, but the company says that they “are aiming to make the game as accessible as possible,” so any user with Snow Leopard and a Core 2 processor should be able to play the game without any problems.

SimCity will be a complete overhaul from past installments. Just from the nine-minute gameplay video that we saw a few months, the new game will include much more detail and better graphics this time around, making the city-building experience more realistic for the players. We definitely can’t wait to get our hands on it.

SimCity announced via Twitter that gamers will be able to play a “one hour slice” of the new game at any point during the four-day period. We’re not sure exactly if Maxis or EA Games have a particular section of the game that they’ll be handing out for beta testing, but we assume that the game will start from the beginning, showing you the tutorial and then giving you a little bit of time to explore the game on your own.

In fact, there’s a new SimCity video that was just uploaded today to YouTube, and it shows off the tutorial at the beginning of the game. So, if you can’t even wait until the 25th to see what it’s like, the video is your next best option until then. However, it appears that the video wasn’t uploaded by an official source, so who knows how long the video will stay up before it gets pulled.

Those interested in trying out the beta should head on over to the SimCity website and sign up. The full game is expected to hit shelves on March 5 for US gamers and March 8 for those in Europe. It’s important to note that the beta looks to be a closed beta, and while anyone can sign up, they most likely won’t let all gamers in.

[via Kotaku]

Originally we were told that the game would get a February release window, so it seems that its been delayed slightly, but an early March release shouldn’t be anything to complain about. The announcement came from SimCity’s official Twitter account, where they mentioned all “mayors” to mark their calendars for March 5, and for March 8 for Europeans.

SimCity will be running in the new Glassbox engine, which Maxis built in-house to give the game more realistic simulations thanks to micro-level AI for all objects in the game, big and small. EA hasn’t announced any pricing details yet, but the game will be available through EA’s Origin service and through traditional DVD format for both Mac and PC.

The last we looked at the gameplay of SimCity was earlier this month when Maxis posted up a 9-minute video demonstrating the game’s graphics and features. To say the least, we were stunned by the detail of the game, and the graphics were extremely lifelike. Gameplay itself is similar to past SimCity titles, so most gamers shouldn’t have a problem getting back into the SimCity groove.

[via Eurogamer]

SimCity lead designer Stone Librande walks us through the game by building a city of his own from scratch. He explains the basic concepts of the game and mentions a few rules that you have to follow in order to really get going in the game and create your dream city (like providing electricity, water, jobs, etc.).

Librande demonstrates some of the strategies that you can use, like building casinos to increase city revenue and building train stations to bring in loads of tourists to those casinos. Librande also demonstrates some of the different views that players can switch between, as well as explaining some of the HUD items.

The game looks simply amazing and incredibly detailed. Maxis has definitely delivered here, and this video just makes us want to play the game even more than before. Hopefully they release a demo sooner than the February release date, and possibly some DLC in the future. Until then, we have our calendars marked.

[via The Verge]

Registration went live shortly after Electronic Arts discussed the beta during its Gamescom press conference. We’re not sure when this beta itself is going to go live, but we imagine (or hope, whichever term you prefer) that it’s only a few weeks away. Also unknown is which platforms are included in this beta, as Electronic Arts didn’t clarify if this beta is open to those playing on a Mac.

This closed beta isn’t just going down to offer longtime SimCity fans a look at the new iteration. In many ways, it’s a necessity for Maxis and Electronic Arts, as they’re requiring that all SimCity players have a persistent Internet connection while playing. The idea behind it is that individual players will be part of a larger persistent world, which – aside from the thinly veiled always-on DRM – does sound pretty cool. Let’s just hope that Maxis and Electronic Arts can get all of the kinks worked out before release – after all, remember how all of that beta testing helped the launch of Diablo III?

As stated above, we don’t know when this beta will be going live, but with registration now up and running, it can’t be far off. Given the large following SimCity has built in the past two decades, you can count on the fact that a lot of people will be interested in signing up, so good luck getting in. The registration form can be found here, and be sure to keep checking back with us here at SlashGear for more information on SimCity!

Most notably, Game Jar highlights the insane attention to detail that the developers have brought to the game. The city that you’re commanding truly feels alive, with citizens strolling the streets, entering and leaving stores, as well as driving vehicles. You can also follow individual members of the public, watching them leave their home for work and keeping an eye on them all the way to their final destination.

Building up your city has been simplified. If you want to place a road, for example, you simply drag it from your toolbar and lay it across the cityscape as necessary. You can even manipulate the curvature of the road. Once you’ve made your decision, builders will arrive on the scene to begin work. In the case of houses, they’ll known down the surrounding area, and put up a nice “For Sale” sign when work is completed.

Cooperation with other players also seem to be a key element in the new SimCity. If you’re playing online and a player is close to your city, what you do could have a knock-on effect. You can also play together, helping to construct large projects, like a power generator, that would benefit both your citys. You can’t directly destroy or create anything in another city, but you can influence what happens. If you construct a casino and let crime run rampant along the border, the other city would have to invest more in law enforcement.

The takeaway from the preview seems to be the necessary concentration and due diligence that needs to be applied to your city, possibly much more than any previous SimCity game. Every move that you make has consequences, so you have to pay attention to exactly what you’re doing.