Trivia / SimCity (2013)

• Creator Killer/Franchise Killer: The game's myriad issues has pretty much ruined both its franchise and directly led to the closure of developer Maxis two years after release. To rub salt in the wound, the same month Maxis was shut down (March 2015), another city-builder would be released on Steam to critical and commercial acclaim, which resulted in the disintegration of SimCity's remaining user base. Only one other game released following this one when EA licensed out the brand to Track Twenty for the social-based SimCity BuildIt (either as a last-ditch effort to save the franchise or do some cash grab before it all inevitably would collapse into a heaping pile of rubble), the many problems and complaints with that game ended up putting it on borrowed time and the series has laid dormant since. The negative outcry from players, developers, and investors over the disastrous launch and a handful of other problems (including getting the "Worst Company in America" Golden Poo award from The Consumerist twice in a row) led to the resignation of EA CEO John Riccitello in March 2013. ^note There is another game that also indirectly had a turn at killing Maxis, The Sims 4 was also released without many features players were expecting at launch, which you can read more about on its respective page.
• Demand Overload: The game is best known for its server crash at release that prevented the game from being played, with many regarding it as one of the most disastrous launches in modern gaming history. Although in this case it was because of poor server design. What's worse, a constant connection to the server was a requirement, even in single-player. It's gone down in history as a massive failure of a publisher to anticipate user needs, rather than an unexpected rush on established bandwidth service.
• Dueling Games: With Cities: Skylines from Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive. To say that the latter game won is a massive understatement.
• Shrug of God: The developers of the game are on the record for saying they always anticipated traffic would be an added challenge in the game. Translation: "We're as stumped as actual city planners. Tough."
• Streisand Effect: During the game's disastrous launch, EA refused to offer refunds to those who bought the game through their service, but Amazon was all too happy to give them out. EA was not pleased by this and tried censoring any posts on their forums that tried to call attention to this, but all that did was cause everyone to give EA even more negative publicity than they were already facing and bring even more attention to Amazon offering refunds.
• What Could Have Been: Had SimCity been successful, The Sims 4 (then code named "Olympus") would've been online-only as well, but after the game's disastrous launch and eventual abandonment, the Sims team was forced to scrap almost all their progress only a year and a half from release. As that game's Trivia page notes, this had some knock-on effects of their own.