Electronic Arts (EA) has just delivered a textbook case on how to horrendously botch a product launch. The company’s decision to employ always-on digital rights management (DRM) technology that forces gamers to play online proved to be a complete disaster after the company’s servers were quickly overwhelmed during the game’s launch last week, thus rendering it unplayable for everyone who purchased it. EA has now issued a formal apology for the game launch and is offering everyone who purchased it a free game as compensation. In a company blog post, Maxis label general manager Lucy Bradshaw said that the company was not expecting demand for the game to be so high and admitted that it was “dumb” to not prepare better. Bradshaw made no mention of whether the company would remove the always-on DRM requirement as a condition for playing the game in the future.
EA apologizes for botched SimCity launch
Published Mar 11th, 2013 10:11PM EDT
If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs.
This article talks about:
EA
Brad Reed has written about technology for over eight years at BGR.com and Network World. Prior to that, he wrote freelance stories for political publications such as AlterNet and the American Prospect. He has a Master's Degree in Business and Economics Journalism from Boston University.
