<story><title>Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues</title><url>http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007VTVRFA?ie=UTF8&amp;force-full-site=1&amp;ref_=aw_bottom_links</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mortenjorck</author><text>EA needs to pivot this game, fast.&lt;p&gt;Even in the best case scenario, where the servers all get fixed &lt;i&gt;this evening&lt;/i&gt; and the game works flawlessly for everyone for a month straight, the damage to the game&apos;s name has been done. The meme is hatched: SimCity 2013 has a highly brittle dependency on poorly-planned cloud infrastructure.&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s a private region mode in the game (that you nonetheless can&apos;t use offline in the current architecture). EA needs to have Maxis crunch for the next couple of weeks to make this work offline. Yes, I&apos;ve read the nebulous quotes about &quot;part of the sim happening in the cloud.&quot; Whatever that is, they&apos;ll have to move it to the client.&lt;p&gt;Once offline play is possible, if EA wants any chance to make back its investment on this game, they&apos;re going to have to first promote the new offline mode, and then spend the next couple of months doing some post-launch rescoping of the multiplayer aspect. They can still make it work; it could still be fantastic – but they have to move fast.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baddox</author><text>&amp;#62;  The meme is hatched: SimCity 2013 has a highly brittle dependency on poorly-planned cloud infrastructure.&lt;p&gt;To the tech-literate crowd, this will be the meme. But for the average gamer, the meme is different, and I might argue worse: Sim City simply doesn&apos;t work.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues</title><url>http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007VTVRFA?ie=UTF8&amp;force-full-site=1&amp;ref_=aw_bottom_links</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mortenjorck</author><text>EA needs to pivot this game, fast.&lt;p&gt;Even in the best case scenario, where the servers all get fixed &lt;i&gt;this evening&lt;/i&gt; and the game works flawlessly for everyone for a month straight, the damage to the game&apos;s name has been done. The meme is hatched: SimCity 2013 has a highly brittle dependency on poorly-planned cloud infrastructure.&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s a private region mode in the game (that you nonetheless can&apos;t use offline in the current architecture). EA needs to have Maxis crunch for the next couple of weeks to make this work offline. Yes, I&apos;ve read the nebulous quotes about &quot;part of the sim happening in the cloud.&quot; Whatever that is, they&apos;ll have to move it to the client.&lt;p&gt;Once offline play is possible, if EA wants any chance to make back its investment on this game, they&apos;re going to have to first promote the new offline mode, and then spend the next couple of months doing some post-launch rescoping of the multiplayer aspect. They can still make it work; it could still be fantastic – but they have to move fast.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AlexDanger</author><text>Remember EA is a business, not an offshoot of Reddit/HN. Imagine you&apos;re the SimCity product manager and the choice was between a massive refactor or provisioning a bunch of new servers. Which would you choose?&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d love to agree with you, but I just dont think its plausible.</text></comment>