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.
