SimCity Mac Launch Facing More Problems
The launch of the new SimCity back in March made headlines for the problems caused by the game's always-online DRM. EA Maxis even decided that people who bought the game early deserved a free game for their trouble. They also decided to postpone the launch of the Mac version of the game. Well, the delay is over; SimCity has arrived for Macs, and players are now facing a whole new set of installation and launch problems. "Those issues include a 'mutexAlert' error, which can be resolved by switching the OS to English. Another simply doesn't allow a player to install the game once downloaded. The suggested solution for that is to re-install Origin and opt in to the new Beta version. The game also apparently doesn't currently support Mac OS X 10.7.4 nor the upcoming 10.9 beta release." There are also reports that the game won't function on high-resolution display settings.
I think there's some sort of secret meta-game here. They planned it all along. The actual "winning the game" is getting it to run at all and "playing" is all the troubleshooting. It's actually more of a realtime strategy puzzle game than a simulation, that was just the cover. That or EA absolutely sucks.
someone that i know that works at EA (actually she work at Maxis) told me that an Experimental Linux port of the game may have 0 Problems if released, but apparently (according to his boss) they wont release it because they have not yet implemented a "good" DRM scheme for Linux.
Well, there goes all the love and goodwill that EA has built up over lo' these many decades.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
They have been building up an impressive amount of awards to match.