SimCity On Mac Is Looking Like Another EA Launch Disaster

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SimCity Meteor_656x369

When SimCity launched for the PC earlier this year, it was a total debacle. Huge swathes of players could not actually play the game they’d purchased at launch, because SimCity perversely required a persistent Internet connection to play. The result was that players experienced long loading times, constant disconnections, crashing and the loss of saved game data. It was such a bad launch that Amazon actually stopped selling SimCity temporarily in response to the criticisms.

Yesterday, SimCity for the Mac launched. And surprise, surprise! The Mac launch is turning out to be just as much of a disaster as the PC one!

Over on the official EA Forums, Mac gamers are posting hundreds of messages expressing their frustrations trying to get the game to work. These problems range from having a hard time connecting to the central server to the game being impossible to install.

In addition, performance is reportedly atrocious. Even Retina MacBook Pros and top-of-the-line iMacs can’t run it well, and many users are constantly being forced to play the game in a small window, since SimCity won’t let them play fullscreen.

Just as they did with the PC launch problems, Maxis and EA are shrugging off the problems as isolated, telling TUAW: “There are a small number of players who have encountered issues with SimCity for Mac. Our live team is working individually with our players to resolve their issues and get them into the game as quickly as possible.”

The truth is, though, that after failing so spectacularly when launching the game on the PC side of things, there’s no excuse for these kinds of problems when launching months later on the Mac. Hopefully Maxis and EA will reconsider the requirement for a persistent internet connection for future games.

Source: TUAW

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