After repeated complains coming in from users on the recently launched version of SimCity, Amazon was forced to temporarily stop sales of the video game.
A new version of SimCity was launched on March 5, much to users' anticipation. However, soon after the launch, complains started pouring in from users who were having trouble with the game. Unfortunately, Amazon was forced to suspend sales of the video game late March 7.
Kip Katsarelis, SimCity Senior Producer, addressed the technical issue in a blog posted Thursday. He said the servers were full due to the large number of people playing the game and the company was planning to increase the number of servers to meet the demand, allowing all users to play the game without much delay.
EA is further planning to eliminate some additional features including the leader boards, achievements and an option to run the game in a fast "cheetah speed" mode, which should reduce the load on the servers giving quicker access to the game, reports BBC news.
The company informed all users about the delay in accessing the game through social media sites, EA forums and blogs. An alert notification was updated on the download page of the game. This led to very poor rating for SimCity on Amazon.
Many frustrated users took to the social media to address the situation.
"Been playing about 2 hours of Tomb Raider while waiting for the #SimCity queue to let me in. Feel like I paid $80 for a broken clock," tweeted one gamer.
"The problem isn't your servers, it's the fact that you unnecessarily have hundreds of thousands of players that don't want to play online still using up server capacity," another person posted in response to Katsarelis's blog.
SimCity was a stand-alone game prior to the launch, but EA decided to enhance the gaming experience to more realism and added the online element. Additional benefit the company saw with the online addition was to control piracy of the title, stated a report in BBC News.
Some users commented that the online addition factor may have crashed servers.
"Want to fix SimCity EA? Get rid of the stupid DRM and servers! We don't need them to play a single player game," a Facebook user wrote. "It's a poor excuse to combat piracy as it makes people pirate and break your game anyway."
