The Human Cost of Failed Products: The Tragic Story Behind the Launch of SimCity 2013
Behind the Doomed Launch of SimCity 2013: A Developer's Perspective on Transparency, Marketing, and the Human Cost of Game Development
Not too long ago I had the pleasure of talking about Paradox Interactive and their initiative to rescue franchises that EA - Maxis had seemingly thrown out onto the road into the middle of nowhere. I was not kind to EA/Maxis, and frankly I’m not being very kind now. But fate was not content with me and my lemonade, so life splashed the lemonade back in my face with this article:
SimCity developers say 2013 launch was "heartbreaking" by Graham Smith
For those who did not read that article I, firstly I recommend it, secondly ouch!
I said this:
“After the tragic and maligned launch of SimCity 2013 ,marking EA’s filicide of it’s child studio Maxis, Paradox arrived as the savior of the city building genre” - Nick Pasta
Firstly I want to say that I did indeed need to google the word Filicide.
Secondly, my statement is not wrong... But…. *wince* I think an article like this allows us to remember and hear the stories of the people behind the products that we use in our everyday, disposable cup lives.
Games, really anything, take a long time to make. These products that we use take multiple years of peoples lives to create and finish. People have children, grow up, retire, grow old, and lose loved ones during the course of any products production. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the consumers world where products are thrown in our face, rejected, and thrown out faster than we can blink. There is a human cost to all of these “things” that we appreciate, and to the ones we don’t.
One of the things that ultimately becomes extremely important in a world like this is transparency. To me, transparency is everything. Tim Schaefer (Creator of Psychonauts and Double Fine) certainly believes so, and so do many other prominent game developers in our field. Transparency creates better work environments, and it creates more empathy from consumers.
The games industry, in particular, is very bad at this. Games usually are not presentable till mere days before they launch. The marketing cycle for games is six months. What do you tell consumers about your product six months before it releases if you don’t even know what it will be like when it launches, or worse, if it will even work.
Such is the fate of Stone Librande, a developer who worked on the doomed SimCity 2013, who was interviewed in this article. We get a behind closed doors look at what it is like to work on a project that was doomed to fail. The reasons for its failure are not set in stone either. I was in highschool when the game came out, and there was a lot about the game that was exceptional. The game was beautifully animated, and had a wonderful presentation. The game also came with a multiplayer component which was a bonus for me so that I could share a world with my brothers (Which was wishful thinking because neither of whom would play it with me anyway). It did have some flaws, but none that couldn’t be resolved with time.
However the game was also a product of its time. It was created at a time when developers were taking large anti-piracy measures which required a constant connection to the games servers, even though the game was mostly single player. The lack of transparency meant that the marketing team just made up a reason for why so it would still sell. And on launch day… The servers shut down. Leaving an entire fanbase in a niche genre with a product that wouldn’t work… Unless they pirated it. Its easy to see why public perception flipped on the developers so quickly. The pirates proved that the marketing claims behind why the game HAD to be online were thinly veiled lies to make the anti-consumer policy more palatable.
So who was wrong? Were the devs wrong for implementing the game in the way that they did? Were the consumers wrong for being mad about being lied to? Was the publisher wrong for wanting the devs to create a game that would be harder to pirate?
What really gets me is this quote from the dev:
“Librande does also say that "at that time every game had multiplayer components", and that he had a "personal goal" to be able to play SimCity with his two sons.”
Which to me really goes to show the level of care, and time that went into this. I can only hope the dev had the chance to play and share the years of work and passion that they had put into the product with their kids.
So is there a lesson to learn from all this? I think that games have evolved a long way since then, and one of the things that has improved is communication and transparency. I think if they had been listening to fans at the time they might have seen this coming, if they had communicated with the server side people they might have known that the servers could not have handled the huge influx of people the game would cause. But going off of yesterdays post, perhaps these are all lessons that they could not have learned without just releasing the game.
So far from what I’ve seen the biggest sin in this industry, or any industry for that matter, is with marketing. Marketing is an extremely important part of any business. Arguably the most important. All too often are we used to being overpromised and under-delivered to. The most respected products are the ones with honest marketing (Though they may not be the highest selling). I think the marketing people were told to lie to the public, and the pirates proved them wrong by doing what EA said they couldn’t do.
In the long run I don’t personally think that this game should have caused the collapse of the studio that made it. Maxis was an amazing studio that had a reputation for being one of the most creative studios in the industry, and I will always be sad that it is not around.
Just like someone needs to kick Valve in the butt and tell them to make something with a 3 on it!
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