Jeremy Y. Venook

SimCity is in a State of Emergency.

Three weeks ago, everything looked to be perfectly in place for Electronic Arts’ first major installment in the series since 2003’s SimCity 4. The marketing was massive and, if the number of pre-sales and digital downloads was any indicator, working. Critical reception, too, was mainly positive, praising the game for maintaining its predecessors’ strengths while adding features to appeal to both seasoned virtual planners and first-time digital mayors. There was only one potential spanner in the works: in the interest of combating online piracy, EA built SimCity to be “always online,” or permanently connected to the company’s servers.

Thus fell the first domino.

In the usual first-day rush that accompanies a major release, the servers crashed under an enormous influx of players, who suddenly found themselves unable to access the game for which they had waited so patiently (not to mention paid $60 for). This wasn’t itself surprising; the freeway always slows to a crawl at rush hour. What was surprising was how crowded the road remained well into the sleepy hours of the night: as errors persisted, it became clear that EA was fatally under-equipped for the game’s day-to-day server demands, so much so that Amazon stopped selling the game altogether due to customer complaints.

Things only get worse from here. As of this writing, EA is taking a self-destructive route to “solving” the problem: they’re adding servers, but they’re also sloughing off features to streamline the game’s server demand. Critics haven’t taken to this too kindly; gaming website Polygon.com, for instance, retroactively dropped the game’s score from a stellar 9.5/10 to an abysmal 4/10. Players aren’t happy, either, to the tune of mass demands for refunds; but when so much of a game’s content is digital downloads, the program is hard to return, and EA isn’t honoring customers’ requests. Perhaps most damning is that EA has pulled the game’s marketing campaign—the problems are so bad that the company is actively trying to slow down the game’s sales. And to top it all off, CEO John Riccitiello has announced that he will be resigning at the end of the month. Unless SimCity pulls out of this nosedive soon (and that doesn’t seem very likely), it looks like SimCity might be going the way of Atlantis.

What’s most interesting about the implosion is that it was entirely avoidable: EA’s “always online” feature was not only self-imposed but part of an active attempt by major game companies to make the anti-piracy measure a new standard for computer games. The first big-name game to do so was Blizzard’s Diablo III last May. The launch came with similar system overloads, spawning the infamous message, “The servers are busy at this time. Please try again later (error 37).” But in a critical difference, Blizzard easily weathered the onslaught—and therein lies the rub.

If the “always online” model is the next big thing in games, as major companies are pushing for it to be, this could be one of the first major developments in gaming history to favor independent developers over big-budget studios. For EA and its ilk, massive production costs make each new release a “go big or go home” proposition; but if they don’t build huge amounts of online infrastructure, and fast, we could be seeing a lot more big games go up in flames like SimCity has. Small studios, on the other hand, simply never have to account for a server-crashing frontloading of players. And for those that do grow to rival their big-budget counterparts—Riot Games’ League of Legends comes to mind—they do so by building slowly, developing the hardware to accommodate millions of players over time rather than all at once.

To a certain extent, that’s how Blizzard was able to survive Diablo III’s opening day onslaught. Though the company was already well established before its iconic online game World of Warcraft was released in 2004, the fan base still grew incrementally, peaking at 12 million players in October 2010—a full six years after its release. Over more than a decade, Blizzard has established itself as the gold standard in online computer games with flagship series like Diablo and StarCraft, the latest expansion for which landed without any major hitches on March 12. Where EA tried to hit the ground running and tripped out of the starting gate, Blizzard’s somewhat softer start gave it the opportunity to bulk up over time.

Though I won’t pretend to understand all of the nuances of the situation, this news certainly gave me cause for speculation. Unless major studios find a way to stop shooting themselves in the feet, the advent of “always online” gaming could be a watershed moment for small-scale developers. Of course, as EA is learning the hard way, success is never certain; but the way the chips are currently falling, we could soon see a major shift beginning in the video game industry.

—Columnist Jeremy Y. Venook can be reached at jvenook@college.harvard.edu.