I've always loved the SimCity series and at various times have spent a large number of hours tinkering with a large city. It's relazing. SimCity 4 was a great entry to the series. it had some oddities (eg regions allowed you to just send trash into the void) but it's a single player game so who cares? Much like No Man's Sky and "balance", as an aside.
But EA decided SimCity 5 had to be played online. Why? Because reasons. Often there's hand-waving about "piracy" but really it's just about control and "encouraging" micro-transactions as a future revenue source. Being able to flaunt your city to other players is a prime driver for people buying digital cosmetics.
But this meant SimCity 5 was vastly more complicated as software. The city size was a lot smaller. They wasted time on multiplayer features nobody cared about. Basically they had zero understanding of who their target market was and what theye liked. As long as some VP can put up a graph in PowerPoint showing projections on micro-transaction revenues and get a fat bonus, who really cares about what the players want.
So what happened/ SimCity 5 was a flop nobody even talks about anymore and it caused Cities Skylines to come into existence.
Fallout 76 [1] is another big example of turning something people loved (ie Fallout 3 and New Vegas) into something despised just because you, the publisher, can't get out of your mind that "online = more revenue".
Old games are loved, so much so that people build software emulators of hardware that is no longer made just to play them.
As for two of John's points:
Why not allocate a single developer at Meta to maintaining the game? Because that's career suicide for that developer. You'll never get promoted for that. You'll probably be viewed as non-essential and gently shown your way to the door with a subpar performance review when some director later needs a better rating for someone they care about and the ratings have to fit a bell curve.
Why not sell it off? Because then it's gone. if you hold ownership you might be able to sell it for a lot in the future. Sell it for $10,000 now and you've gained money that is immaterial and lost any future potential. It just doesn't make sense. You'll spend more than that on lawyers just reviewing the contract.
It was going to be an instant buy for me but then as I read the developer statements before release ... it started getting really weird. It was clear it wasn't going to be Sim City, or at least a lot of design decisions had nothing to do with what I thought of as Sim City.
Such a sad waste.
Really strange too because if there was an obvious formula to make a ton of money there it was and they still screwed it up.
I've always loved the SimCity series and at various times have spent a large number of hours tinkering with a large city. It's relazing. SimCity 4 was a great entry to the series. it had some oddities (eg regions allowed you to just send trash into the void) but it's a single player game so who cares? Much like No Man's Sky and "balance", as an aside.
But EA decided SimCity 5 had to be played online. Why? Because reasons. Often there's hand-waving about "piracy" but really it's just about control and "encouraging" micro-transactions as a future revenue source. Being able to flaunt your city to other players is a prime driver for people buying digital cosmetics.
But this meant SimCity 5 was vastly more complicated as software. The city size was a lot smaller. They wasted time on multiplayer features nobody cared about. Basically they had zero understanding of who their target market was and what theye liked. As long as some VP can put up a graph in PowerPoint showing projections on micro-transaction revenues and get a fat bonus, who really cares about what the players want.
So what happened/ SimCity 5 was a flop nobody even talks about anymore and it caused Cities Skylines to come into existence.
Fallout 76 [1] is another big example of turning something people loved (ie Fallout 3 and New Vegas) into something despised just because you, the publisher, can't get out of your mind that "online = more revenue".
Old games are loved, so much so that people build software emulators of hardware that is no longer made just to play them.
As for two of John's points:
Why not allocate a single developer at Meta to maintaining the game? Because that's career suicide for that developer. You'll never get promoted for that. You'll probably be viewed as non-essential and gently shown your way to the door with a subpar performance review when some director later needs a better rating for someone they care about and the ratings have to fit a bell curve.
Why not sell it off? Because then it's gone. if you hold ownership you might be able to sell it for a lot in the future. Sell it for $10,000 now and you've gained money that is immaterial and lost any future potential. It just doesn't make sense. You'll spend more than that on lawyers just reviewing the contract.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8&t=1s