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)

[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.

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.