Will Wright on SimCity Online Launch: “I Feel Bad for the Team”

Nobody was really very happy when SimCity was revealed to be an always-online game that required you to log into EA’s servers for playing. And when servers couldn’t keep up with the traffic, locking several thousands of users out of the game worldwide, the backlash came quickly for Maxis and EA.

Speaking to GamesIndustry, Will Wright, who created SimCity and founded Maxis before moving on to his new start-up Stupid Fun Club, stated that, “I feel bad for the team. I could have predicted – I kind of did predict there’d be a big backlash about the DRM stuff. It’s a good game; I enjoy playing it a lot.

“It was kind of like, ‘EA is the evil empire, there was a lot of ‘Let’s bash EA over it,’. That was basically inexcusable, that you charge somebody $60 for a game and they can’t play it. I can understand the outrage. If I was a consumer buying the game and that happened to me, I’d feel the same.”

Of course, the situation has since improved but it hasn’t left anyone more comfortable with an always-online game.