Electronic Arts is currently going through a storm with all the bad press swirling around SimCity 5, released under its Maxis Label. It was supposed to be the idyllic launch of a vaunted and long-awaited franchise, but instead a legion of angry gamers are voicing their displeasure online.
Obviously, the solution would have been better beta testing of the online "feature." Lucy Bradshaw, senior vice president at EA and general manager at Maxis cannot possibly be pleased with the results. Her response to the debacle? Bradshaw told VentureBeat:
The beta was helpful in addressing some of the early game issues, and it helped us improve the player journey to get into the game. However, we have experienced issues at launch that were not seen during either our beta or our load testing. One lesson is that we needed longer, more comprehensive beta tests. And another is that a sandbox game like SimCity is not entirely predictable, so our load scenarios needed to be better informed by this and test a wider variety of player variables.
So the beta testing failed to tease out the load problems that occurred during launch. However, that is the purpose of a beta period - to tease out as many issues that could occur at launch as possible. And if beta testing failed to predict the problems that would happen when hoardes of gamers logged on, it was quite simply a failure.
There is a reason that apps are often released in beta nowadays, with invite-only early testers allowed. This is to prevent droves of users from getting a bad user experience before the product is ready for the masses. On the extreme end of this scenario is the Mailbox app for iPhones that has had a waitlist literally hundreds of thousands of names long.
The moral of this story is not to rush your product out the gate, but use the beta testing period to your full advantage.
However, there is a silver lining. EA has done its best to mollify players by offering to make it up to them. Again, Bradshaw to the rescue:
And to get us back in your good graces, we're going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio. On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game.
Of course, it could be a little too little too late, as Bradshaw freely admits:
I know that’s a little contrived – kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.
In the meantime, intrepid gamers have found a workaround to the problem by themselves by taking the game offline - contrary to previous assertions by EA that it could not be done. A player called "Azzer" took the game offline and said the servers were not needed to "crunch" information for the game, implying that the online mode restriction really is one hundred percent for DMCA purposes.
None of this has stopped EA from pushing forward with the game's rollout and marketing. Bradshaw says that servers have been tweaked and extra servers added to handle the load. The question is, will gamers remain to play?
