EA Shuts Down SimCity Developer Maxis Studio

I’m sure if you are like me you fell in love with one of the Sim City games growing up. I know that I spent hours building cities! The latest iteration of SimCity released in 2013 was a hige flop for many reasons and gave some very bad press to Maxis, the studio behind the game. It looks like it Maxis has closed its doors for good!

SimCity

So why was the last version of SimCity so bad? Well first it was decided that the game would require a constant internet connection to play. EA and Maxis claimed that the game required it to function, the was later proved false. EA also happened to threaten BETA testers of the game with a total game ban if they did not report bug. When the game launched users were forced to queue for server access for 30 minutes or more! Not the best experience for users and to the reputation of Maxis and EA.

Things got so bad that Amazon actually stopped selling the game after receiving 800 poor reviews. Maxis tried to blame the games popularity for the issues then actually offered SimCity owners a free game through Origin as a sort of way of apologizing. Things got worse as the always-on DRM let you destroy other people’s cities and then EA decided they wanted to charge gamers $9 for the Airships DLC that literally gave you Airship Hangar, the Commuter Airship Mooring, and two Hot Air Balloon Parks. Not much of a value for $9, especially considering you paid $60 for the game.

So SimCity did not sell well at all and really put a bad taste in gamers mouth when it came to both Maxis and EA. Because of this the next major release from Maxis, The SIms 4 did not sell that well either and the SimCity mobile game SimCity Build-It has not broken any records either.

Designer at Maxis Guillaume Pierre confirmed the closing of the studio on twitter yesterday.

EA later confirmed the closing as well and the IP for the games is being transferred to other studios and Maxis employees are being given the opportunity to apply for other jobs within EA.

Source: Geek.com | News Archive

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