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

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

[weszz]

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...

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

[jandrese]

One thing to be aware of: Cities: Skylines mod support includes a full C# compiler and does not run in a sandbox. It has the potential to install malware on your machine.

Re:EA got too greedy (as usual)

[Fire_Wraith]

Steam is certainly not without its drawbacks.

However, as a gamer, and even as someone who is profoundly wary of DRM schemes, I find that Steam at least offers some advantages to me, the user. Once I purchase a game, I can download it to any machine I like, so if I get a new computer, or my old hard drive crashes, I still have all my games. I can even delete games I'm not playing to save disk space, and reload them later if I so feel like it. I can get updates and fixes quickly and seamlessly. It may be relatively minor, but it's something that the service offers me. It's also very easy to find and buy new games, new expansions for ones I have, etc.

In turn, I'm tied to the service for those games, but the restrictions have not proven intrusive to me in my regular playing. I can play offline, and really haven't had any problems with that. About the only thing I've found I can't do is play two online games at once on two computers side by side - but I can play one offline while the other is online.

Now, you may find the tradeoff isn't worth it for you, and that's certainly fair - but at least Steam offers something to the user, where most DRM schemes are solely hassles to the customer for the benefit of the company (Ubisoft, EA, etc).

Re:EA got too greedy (as usual)

[TechyImmigrant]

Once upon a time, I worked for EA.

The managers from EA were obsessed with the milestones.
What was important was not the game, but the progress towards its completion, so we had a fixed schedule, and we had to deliver the game at these schedules.
If you screwed your schedule, you were dead, since they paid when a milestone was reached.
It was pretty arbitrary.

The game was cancelled before its end, once they realized that it was not even amusing and probably also because they killed games that had no commercial potential.

I doubt they changed much since this time.

I remember EA back in the Apple ][ days. They made some awesome games of clearly higher quality than everyone else. I remember reading how they set up to achieve that, because they were dissatisfied with the products they were seeing.

Something changed pretty radically.