Electronic Arts Needs to Deal with This Blunder Fast

The long-awaited release of Electronic Arts‘ (NASDAQ:EA) SimCity game, which was scheduled for Tuesday, did not go as planned. It should have been a wonderful night for fans, but that is not what happened. It turns out that EA was not able to muster up the online serves it needed for customers who were building their own cities. The technical problems meant that some gamers were prevented from playing for days.

The company blamed the problems on “server instability.” Regardless of the issue, EA has been struggling with damage control ever since the North American launch. This is a serious blow to the company because the Sim franchise has been very valuable to the company since it first came out 24 years ago.

The problem is a result of EA’s design because the game was not designed with an offline mode. This means that even if a player does not want to team up with others or join cities, they still cannot play offline. This is a way to crack down on piracy in this PC-only game, but it has not turned out well so far.