The creators of the new SimCity computer game stopped short of giving the troubled game an all-clear on Sunday night, but the period of near-inoperability appeared close to an end.
“Our players have been able to connect to their cities in the game for nearly eight million hours of gameplay time, and we’ve reduced game crashes by 92 percent from Day 1,†Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of the Electronic Arts development studio Maxis, said in an online statement.
This new city-building game went on sale in the early hours last Tuesday, but its requirement that the game run only while connected to the Internet ran afoul of EA-run servers that were immediately clogged. Gamers were locked out of playing the latest in what was ostensibly a single-player series because of EA’s unusual online-lways requirement.
Ms. Bradshaw said on Sunday that maintenance on existing servers and the addition of several had allowed many more players to join the game. First-hand attempts to log in by The New York Times succeeded starting on Sunday after several days of connection errors.
On Friday, in another online statement, Ms. Bradshaw apologized for the game’s debut. She attempted to quell fan rage with an apology for failing to have sufficient server capacity â€" “that was dumb†â€" and with the offer of a free EA PC game to anyone who purchases SimCity before next Monday. In a brief e-mail interview, Ms. Bradshaw said that the genesis of the problem was that “simply put, we underestimated the surge in customers we had right at launch and the demand that the game would have on our servers once in the wild.â€
EA stock rose during the week of SimCity’s introduction, investors apparently unsw! ayed by the game’s woes or confident in EA’s ability to get past them. How long fans will hold a grudge is another story.
