SimCity Declared A Disaster Zone

On March 8, Lucy Bradshaw, General Manager of Maxis, posted the following on EA’s The Beat blog:

Lucy Bradshaw. At large somewhere in Emeryville, CA.

The server issues which began at launch have improved significantly as we added more capacity. But some people are still experiencing response and stability problems that we’re working fast to address.

So what went wrong?  The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected.  More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.

“OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it.  In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent.  It’s working – the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically.  The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent.

So we’re close to fixed, but not quite there.  I’m hoping to post another update this weekend to let everyone know that the launch issues are behind us.”

In order to sweeten the pot, EA is offering up a free game. Probably Diablo III or Command & Conquer 4.

And to get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio.  On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game.
I know that’s a little contrived – kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy.  But we feel bad about what happened.  We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.
SimCity is a GREAT game and the people who made it are incredibly proud.  Hang in there – we’ll be providing more updates throughout the weekend.

On the SimCity blog, Barrie Tingle posted (Barrie Tingle and Ocean Quigley have the best names at EA. They’re like Australian sitcom characters.) the following:

Hi everyone! My name is Barrie Tingle and I’m one of the Live Operation Producers on SimCity. Since I am directly involved with the live service of the game, I wanted to take the time to update you about all the changes we’ve made recently, hopefully some you’ve already noticed.

The biggest change is that we’ve added three brand new servers (EU West 3/4 & EU East 3) yesterday. And today we added yet another (Oceanic 2). The addition of these new servers is our ongoing commitment to ensure we get everyone into the game. In addition to the new servers, we also issued a patch today that not only contains server optimizations, but also resolves a number of crash fixes, including one that commonly occurred on servers experiencing lag. For the full details and fixes, you can view our patch notes here. Between these new servers and the patch yesterday, we’re seeing more and more people successfully play, and most importantly, have fun.

A SimCity Reddit page tears apart, well, just about everything.

Imma let you continue, but UbiSoft had the best DRM…

And then there’s the open letter on Reddit by an apparent EA employee that went public and then promptly disappeared. But this is the Internet, and nothing ever truly disappears.

To the executives at EA, from one of your employees

I am deeply embarrassed by the troubled launch of Sim City and I hope you are too. When I walk around our campus and look at the kind of talent we’ve collected, the amenities we have access to and the opportunities working at such a big company affords us, I can’t imagine how for release after release, EA continues to make the same embarrassing, anti-consumer mistakes. We should be better than this. You should not be failing us so badly.

Another thing I see when I walk around our campus are massive banners that display what are said to be our company values. They are on posters on every floor, included in company-wide emails and hanging above the cafeteria in bright colors. You even print them on our coffee mugs so we see them every day. But somehow when planning the launch of Sim City, you threw them all out the window.

Most important of the values you are ignoring is Think Consumers First. What part of the Sim City DRM scheme, which has rendered the game unplayable for hundreds of thousands of fans across the globe, demonstrates that you are thinking about consumers before you are thinking about yourselves? Does “first” mean something different in boardrooms than it does to the rest of us? Does the meaning of that word change when you get the word “executive” in front of your title?

You can’t even pretend that you didn’t know consumers would be angry about this. Common sense aside, consumers complained about this during your public betas. In fact, when one of them posted his criticisms on the forums, he was banned! You tried to silence your critics. The same thing is happening now as users write in to demand refunds. What part of this behavior aligns with our company value to Be Accountable?

What you’ve demonstrated with this launch is that our corporate management does not believe in our core values. They are for the unwashed masses, not for the important people who forced this anti-consumer DRM onto the Sim City team. This DRM scheme is not about the consumers or even about piracy. It’s about covering your own asses. It allows you to hand-wave weak sales or bad reviews and blame outside factors like pirates or server failures in the event the game struggles. You are protecting your own jobs at the expense of consumers. I think this violates the Act With Integrity value I’m looking at on my own coffee mug right now.

On behalf of your other employees, I’d like to ask you to fix this. Allow the Sim City team to patch the game to run offline. If Create Quality and Innovation is still a core value that you believe in, then this shouldn’t be a hard decision. Games that gamers can’t play because of server overload or ISP issues are NOT quality. Be Bold by giving the consumers what they want and take accountability for the mistake.

Finally I’d like to ask you to follow the last company value on the list in the future: Learn and Grow. When you made this mistake with Spore, the company and all your employees suffered for it. You didn’t learn from that mistake and you are making it again with Sim City.

So please, learn from this debacle. Don’t do this again. Grow into better leaders and actually apply our company values when you make decisions. Don’t just use them as tools to motivate your staff. With the money, talent and intellectual property available to EA, we should be leading the industry into a golden age of consumer-focused game publishing. Instead we’re the most reviled game publisher in the world. That’s your fault. Things can only change if you actually start following the company values and apply them to every title we launch.

Sincerely,

A Disappointed But Hopeful Artist at EARS

EDIT: with regards to proof, I am an employee, so I do not want to jeopardize my standing, but today, all regular EA employees got an e-mail with a note from Gabrielle Toledano in celebration of International Women’s Day. Another EA employee would have to confirm, but its the most proof I’m willing to risk providing.