Amazon suspends sales of SimCity video game

[Mulreay]

Ongoing problems with the latest version of SimCity led Amazon to briefly stop selling the game.

The web retailer stopped sales late on 7 March as players reported continued problems with the city building title.

The latest version of SimCity was launched on 5 March and, like many current games, demand players stay online as they play.

EA has also taken steps to fix login delays by turning off some features to lighten the load on game servers.

Prior to this latest release, SimCity was a stand-alone game, but EA has added the online element to infuse the title with more realism.

Now player cities exist as part of online regions and share some characteristics of those virtual environments such as pollution, crime and essential resources.

The online requirement is also seen as an attempt to curb piracy of the title as a web connection is required even if a player shuns the chance to connect their cities to others.

However, the requirement for all players of the game to be connected has led some to wait 30 minutes or more to play. The server problems have led to sluggish response times, crashes and other bugs.

Full story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21712910

[DaveLembke]

Unfortunately this is no surprise coming from EA. They use to be great and have gone down hill with actions to pull the carpet out from older titles and poor planning on launches. The last game I bought through them was Need for Speed Carbon which luckily operates without issues, but I have seen people complain about other game titles that EA fumbled.

My biggest concern with games requiring an internet connection to their servers is that come say 6 years from now when I want to play this game requiring server handshake, will they support the handshake to be able to play the game or force planned obsolescence by killing off support for older titles. By shutting off support to be able to play these titles is when you would find game cracks out there so that you can play your stand alone game that requires a handshake, and with the game being out there for this long there is no doubt that a server mimic service would be available to be able to still play your legally owned title by which they killed support for and are forced to use an illegal tool to be able to play your $40 game if you are determined to do so!

Games like this requiring a server handshake should legally be able to operate with a 3rd party server mimic service when the original software manufacturer washes their hands of supporting it and dont provide a patch to do away with the handshake requirement. It should be considered abandonware, but legally its not abandoned under current laws that I know of.

I have games that date back to the late 1970's, and its great that I can still play these anytime I want to. But games like this requiring a handshake are games that are not meant to last the test of time without breaking the rules under current law!