EA Halts SimCity Marketing Campaigns

[Shawn Zipay]

Electronic Arts has halted its marketing campaign for SimCity. This comes just a day after Amazon stopped the sell of the digital version of the game and an update to the game removed various game functionality.

EA made it clear to their affiliate partners that they would like the advertising campaign for SimCity to be halted as quickly as possible.

"To be clear we are continuing to payout commissions on all SimCity sales that are referred, however we are requesting that you please stop actively promoting the game. We will notify you as soon as the SimCity marketing campaigns have been resumed and our promotional links are once again live in the Linkshare interface. We apologize for any inconveniences that this may cause, and we thank you for your cooperation."

The image that kicks off this news was taken maybe an hour ago now from my own machine. It highlights what many users have been experiencing now for the past three days or so.

(via Polygon)

[CptainCrunch]

"Please stop making us millions of dollars as it hurts too much" - EA

[Shawn Zipay]

The launch of SimCity is worse than Diablo 3's launch.

I am stating this right here and now as a fact.

It's also on pace to be the worst rated product on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Art...owViewpoints=1

Possibly also the worst rated product on Metacritic in terms of AAA title and based on user scores: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/simcity/user-reviews

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting to get enough time with the game so that I can actually review it...

[signa]

hey what are you talking about? simcity is doing great.

Metacritic — which is the only reason publishers actually care about review scores — never alters a score, once it’s been published. So the Metacritic entry for SimCity from Polygon still stands at ‘95’. In fact, according to Metacritic, the critical consensus is sitting at a nice, healthy, 81.

http://games.on.net/2013/03/simcitys-launch-woes-another-nail-in-the-drm-coffin-a-red-flag-for-games-reviewers-and-bad-news-for-consumers/

[CptainCrunch]

Its now at 76 with a user score of 1.5

[K-16]

What I want to know is what the user score in Metacritic will be two weeks after the capacity issues are resolved. When the online DRM problem becomes addressed, will the damage remain the same? Or will scores climb back up again once people get to enjoy the game and forget their anger? WILL people forget their anger?

So I'm having difficulty trusting any score at this time simply because the service is temporarily faulty, while the product appears to have potential in rebooting the franchise (provided all features were available to the player, instead of its current crippled and nerfed state). It's like giving Half-Life 2 a low score, because SecuROM isn't compatible on some disc drives (I had to wait several months before I could play my copy, but that didn't prevent the game from succeeding later on). Then again, the number of people who could play HL2 on launch day far outnumbers SimCity players to date. Hmm... I'll be interested to recheck the scores after this whole thing blows over.

[Shawn Zipay]

http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/mass-effect-3/user-reviews

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/mass-effect-3/user-reviews

http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/dragon-age-ii/user-reviews

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/dragon-age-ii/user-reviews

There's your answer. Users jump on bandwagons and will not change scores after the fact. Users, in general, are bandwagon jumping idiots who very well may not even own the game.

Nobody should ever put much stock into user scores when they see how wildly varied they are in cases like this.

Also: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/ha...&dist=negative

Example:

This lost me on this game right off the bat. When a game takes 5 hours to install, set up and play there is nothing that can redeem it. Unknown to me, i had to set up an online account to even play the game. No one mentioned this little tidbid to me before i bought the game. I thought the internet connection requirement was for online play not for activation. I can only get phone modem connection in the country and needless to say it took some time. Not even Microsoft does this to its customers. Then the game started and i had to wonder around like an idiot to find my purpose. On the plus side, unlike Doom3, it didn't kill my pc. It ran smoothly on my high res lcd monitor. In the end, this game sucks as did Doom 3... I wish people out there quit hyping up games like this. When Far Cry came out it was a real revelation and that's the way it should be. What a disappointment this last few months have been!!

[K-16]

Hmm... I see. So it goes down from shared complaints (launch issues, story/feature disagreement, etc.), then up when they play the game in its prime, then down again as reviewers compare the game to standards of 7 years later, specifically lowering the score to ask other people to "move on from this overrated game." I do find this consistent trend incredibly disturbing, yet I will keep this in mind. I'm actually surprised you dug and found a 2004 review (Half-Life 2's release year), instead of the 2011 reviews criticizing its outdated graphics. Many thanks for the answer to my earlier question: User reviews give off too much statistical noise to determine an actual consensus/reception of a product.