EA Sells 1.1 million SimCity Copies Despite Server Issues

For those of you who have been living under a rock recently, there has been a lot of action going on with regards to EA:

• Maxis General Manager says Online Nature of SimCity is Fundamental to the Game (16th March 2013)
• A SimCity Mod by UKAzzer allows Offline Playability (15th March 2013)
• Angry employee’s open letter to EA over SimCity’s series of server bloopers (10th March 2013)
• Amazon returns money after SimCity dissatisfaction to a player while EA still being stubborn (9th March 2013)

As you can see for the most part the news of SimCity has been inherently negative with either EA being involved in controversy, or responding to criticism. So on the face of things you might think that SimCity has suffered in all of this? Well no, as it seems quite the opposite has happened. SimCity has sold over 1.1 million copies in the first 2 weeks of its release.

EA has stated that the sales figures make this the biggest SimCity launch of all time. Interestingly, 54% of all sales have been digital downloads via Origin or other digital download services.

“SimCity had a great weekend with sales strong across both North America and Europe, adding to overwhelming demand at launch that has us tracking well beyond expectations for the game,” said Peter Moore, chief operating officer for EA. “SimCity is one of the storied brands in gaming, and Maxis delivered a game re-envisioned and engineered for the online age.”

All these gamers playing SimCity, and forced to use the Origin service as a result, have helped set new records for peak concurrent users on Origin – currently at 1.3 million and rising. In the two weeks SimCity players have managed 15 million hours of online gameplay, 5.7 million cities and 780 million buildings with enough road and railway tracks constructed to circle the globe more than 40,000 times – all very impressive stuff.

Since the initial server troubles Maxis has increased server capacity by more than 400% improving response times by a similar amount. Players can have up to 16 cities at once so the expectation is that servers will need to continue to grow at a much faster rate than the game sale rate.

On a slightly off-topic note, if all the doom-and-gloom of the past few weeks around SimCity has got you down, then be sure to reminisce with our just-published review of the classic SimCity 4 game.

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