SimCity's Empire Has Fallen and Skylines Is Picking Up the Pieces

sarahnaomi writes: Colossal Order's SimCity-like game, Cities: Skylines, sold more than half a million copies in its first week. The first 250,000 of those were sold in the first 24 hours, making it the fastest-selling game its publisher, Paradox Interactive, has ever released. Only a week before Skylines was released, game publisher Electronic Arts announced that it was shutting down SimCity developer Maxis' studio in Emeryville, which it acquired in 1997.

"I feel so bad about Maxis closing down," Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen said. "The older SimCitys were really the inspiration for us to even consider making a city builder." At the same time, Hallikainen admits SimCity's mistakes were Colossal Order's opportunity. "If SimCity was a huge success, which is what we expected, I don't know if Skylines would have ever happened," she said, explaining that it would have been a harder pitch to sell to Paradox if the new SimCity dominated the market.

Comments

EA got too greedy (as usual)

[Anonymous Coward]

Forced to play online. Not enough server support. Too much DLC. Incredibly overpriced DLC.

Goodbye SimCity, you were great long ago.

Re:EA got too greedy (as usual)

[TrippTDF]

EA is a terrible company- it would rather run an amazing franchise into the ground rather than give customers what they really want. I'm glad to see that other companies are picking up what Maxis could no longer do.

Re:EA got too greedy (as usual)

[Iamthecheese]

That's not the point. Requiring steam is requiring a separate application that must be let online, that tracks your usage and purchases, and that is everything evil about "always online" except the relatively minor inconvenience of actually being required to connect.

Re:EA got too greedy (as usual)

[Sowelu]

That's a Paradox thing. The games they publish (well, make, really) are well known for having a ton of optional, aesthetic DLCs. These landmarks are a lot pricier than normal, but it sure as hell is optional! I'm hoping that this game will follow the Paradox business model in the future.

Example for Europa Universalis: New units for your conquistadors? Do they change the gameplay? No, not at all, they just make it so if you're Spanish-ish, and fussing around in New World colonies, your unit art is different. Um... great? It's $2.50. Not worth it. Crusader Kings, new character portraits that are more realistic for certain cultures? $2.50...nahhh. Another hour of music that goes into the rotation when playing as certain religions? Also $2.50. Not worth it at all for new players, but if you've already dumped two hundred hours and don't use your own soundtrack, yes it is...and unlike little art or code changes, you know they had to pay some composer a nontrivial amount of money to commission it, so it's all cool. They also like to add expansions for $10, $15 or so that add major new mechanics, but they're always optional--never prerequisites for future DLCs--and they come with free patches that tweak bugs and existing mechanics. I think I own all of the music mods, none of the art mods, and 75% of the gameplay mods for EU4 and CK2, and I'm pretty happy with their a la carte system. Just remember they're supposed to be optional.

Also remember that this game IS NOT CONNECTED to the (terrible) Cities XL series. Different creators, different publishers. I have no idea how they didn't get taken to court for the name because there is massive marketplace confusion here, but they aren't related.

Re:EA got too greedy (as usual)

[Halo1]

You can connect once, buy the game, put Steam in offline mode and never connect again.

At least if you never ever want to buy a game on Steam again. Otherwise, as soon as you connect again, it will automatically upload to Steam statistics regarding how much you've played the game, what "achievements" you've unlocked etc (even if you disable SteamPlay/auto-synchronisation).

And if you have bad luck, Steam will have blocked your account in the mean time because you haven't logged in for over a year and when the Steam application detects that, it will block all games you have locally because it no longer has valid cached credentials (you can't got back to offline mode). And then you can't play anymore until you've contacted support to have them unblock/reset your account. And yes, that happened to me.

It's true, you don't have to be online all the time. But you better be online either regularly or never again at all.

Re:EA got too greedy (as usual)

[Halo1]

Automatically getting your account blocked and all of your games disabled if you log in again after having been offline for a very long time (regardless of what the reason was) has nothing to do with paranoia.

Apart from that, I just think I should have full control over with whom I want to share when and what I play, without any major or minor inconveniences. Juggling Steam copies and whatnot should not be necessary. Seriously, I already paid for the games.

Re:EA got too greedy (as usual)

[nwf]

Something changed pretty radically.

I'll bet that something has an M a B and an A in it somewhere. Trying to turn an unpredictable creative process into a factory that produces widgets.

Re:EA got too greedy (as usual)

[farble1670]

As mentioned two levels up, they did lock my account after several years of not logging in, and I had to mail support to get it unlocked again.

that's because your situation is likely to be a hacked account. let's face it, you're acting extremely paranoid. don't be surprised when you get flagged for that behavior.

Re:EA got too greedy (as usual)

[DocHoncho]

Jim Sterling ranted about this. Basically, at some point the creative types who started a studio start to feel overwhelmed by the managerial aspects of running a company. So they bring in "professional management," many of whom from come industries entirely unlike the games industry. So some CEO who previously ran a shoe manufacturer gets brought on into a game studio and proceeds to enact policies that would, were making games anything like manufacturing, make things more efficient. Instead, these policies completely destroy the creativity of the team, and eventually the people who were making the great games move on to greener (money ain't the only green!) pastures, leaving a desiccated husk of a studio which continues to churn out garbage hoping desperately to move units based solely on the whatever brand recognition remains intact.

Whether or not you consider games to be art, creating games is undeniably a creative endeavor. When the bean counters move in with their metrics and demands for predictable results... well, shit like SimCity 2013 happens. If the new management is lucky enough to have a highly regarded franchise, expect them to churn out yearly increments of whatever they think works. You only have to look at the endless Battlefield and Call of Duty releases to see that reliable sales figures is more important than creating new and interesting games. Like OP said, a factory that produces widgets. Formulaic crap is the order of the day, and despite the fact that we all know it sucks, people still eat it up.

Re:EA got too greedy (as usual)

[bzipitidoo]

You're scaring me. You wear your chains willingly, and mock people who protest. Slave.

It's been said that Steam is DRM done right. All who think that don't appreciate that the only amount of DRM that is okay or right is none at all! If it's possible for DRM to shut down legitimately purchased games, no matter the circumstances, that's wrong. The only good DRM is dead DRM.

And don't confuse keeping track of accomplishments with DRM, like some others in this thread.

Good. Fuck EA.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is all.

Small things forgiven...

[weszz]

I've sunk a bunch of time into it and gotten to 7 tiles so far, feels like a big city and a number of highway entrances, subways, trains etc... feels spacious and i don't have to destroy my early area to keep moving forwards...

But yea, there are some annoyances like the traffic backups here and there and finding ways that shouldn't be needed around them, but they aren't EA, they set the price lower and have been open about what they are doing. They've built up goodwill so I cut them a lot of slack. It's a good game and worth the time and money.

Now they start doing stuff like EA has over the years with madden exclusivity, the sim city stuff and everything else, then I won't even look at games they release.

I didn't know they were coming out with a different Europa Universalis, which is a game I enjoyed many years ago and totally forgot about...

Maxis closing?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you cared about Maxis as a game studio that made a lot of classic games, they've been gone for a while. EA has long ago assimilated Maxis into the fold.

If you care about the Maxis name, it is still around. They closed a location in Emeryville, not the entire studio.

Simcity screwed themselves

[tompaulco]

EA screwed up Simcity when it decided to turn it into the Facebook of city builders. Nobody wants to play a single person strategy game online with all their friends. Nobody wants to have to buy content to fix issues with the game.Nobody wants city sizes smaller than the previous version.
I eventually bought it when they released the offline mode, but I still found it kind of disappointing.

Re:Civ V is awesome

[sjames]

Well yeah, they finally finished writing the game.

Re:I know we don't like EA...

[Theaetetus]

I can work around em, but yea... when my trains all get piled up it is a problem...

and cars going to the right lane miles before their exit causing a backup with cars merging on is a problem too...

As others have noted, this is realistic. There's also a real-world solution for it - exits should occur before merges. That way, there's an empty lane for cars to merge into. By having a merge before the exit, as highway throughput increases, you experience jams.