EA’s Lucy Bradshaw acknowledges SimCity ‘stumbled out of the gate with our service’ (interview)

GamesBeat: How did you determine the number of servers to have on launch day?

Bradshaw: We base these decisions on internal benchmarks, demand metrics and beta participation. What we underestimated was a huge surge in pre-orders within the last week and player behavior once in the game, for example the longer game sessions that I referenced before.

GamesBeat: If I so choose, I can start a private game and play completely by myself, which would basically turn SimCity into a single-player experience. You’ve given players that choice, so why take away the choice to play offline?

Bradshaw: Even in a private game where you own the entire region and have elected to play solo, we still do a great deal of activity on our servers to keep the state of your region up to date for all of the cities you play to have the same information. Events, trades, collaboration between cities to build Great Works, world challenges, global leaderboards, and global achievements are all systems that we have created to support this concept of a connected world where cities interact and affect one another. Additionally, we save your cities to the cloud. This allows you to play from any computer and access them easily.

GamesBeat: Was there a way to create multiplayer interactivity in the game without requiring the always-on connection?

Bradshaw: We set about a design vision that we fully embraced and it threaded through every decision we made. It was a huge effort to address the specifics of a new design, an all-new simulation that both gives you the most detailed simulation in the franchise yet but also the regional simulation, events, challenges, the social support to engage players, with chat, region wall, leaderboards, achievements and great works. The design we embarked upon relies upon that connection.

GamesBeat: Will EA reconsider doing “always connected” games in the future in favor of restoring offline single-player games?

Bradshaw: I can’t speak on behalf of other creative teams at EA. For Maxis, we will always try to create games that are new and exciting, redefining the simulation genres. Connected or unconnected isn’t a business decision for Maxis. It’s a creative decision that many of our players are enjoying right now. Our troubles exist because we stumbled out of the gate on our service — and for that we are sorry — but we are working hard to make it right. We stand by our design and players who are experiencing it are giving us great feedback.

GamesBeat: Did EA take anything from the server queue issues of Star Wars: The Old Republic into account with SimCity’s launch?

Bradshaw: We did end up mirroring some of their pre-launch preparation and activities. They had an early access program, but they also conducted a worldwide launch that let North Americans and Europeans into the game at the same time. We executed a similar plan with SimCity where we let players trickle in from around the world over the course of a week. Americans got in on March 5, Australians and Japanese on March 6, parts of Europe on March 7 and the U.K. on March 7. We felt this was an effective plan, but the issue was that our servers had issues from day one, and that snowballed throughout the course of the week and compounded our difficulties.

GamesBeat: How are the resources required for SimCity different?

Bradshaw: We have many of the same needs in terms of roles and expertise that we always have: great designers, amazing artists, and expert engineers. With the addition of our online services we add to our team DBA’s, online engineers, java scripters, experts in web services and more. We also take a different approach to launching a game in that we need a live ops team who monitors our service to assure it is performing well, that players are having a great time and to continually improving it as a service, while we also continue to support it with new content and capabilities.
At EA we have a host of teams who work on capabilities that we can draw upon as we make our games as well.

GamesBeat: Does EA feel it’s lost customers thanks to these issues?

Bradshaw: I like to think that if anything, we had a few potential players who just pressed pause before jumping in. But in reality, we’re seeing very high usage across the board, some really cool things that players are doing inside the game, and we love the passion and support we’re seeing from our community. People are loving the game, we knew they would love it, and we hope that even more keep jumping in to give to give it a go.

GamesBeat: How many people can play at once now?

Bradshaw: Our servers can now support several hundred thousand peak concurrent players, and we’ve reached peaks just in the first week that were literally 100 percent above our early estimations.

GamesBeat: How do you feel about the whole debate about changing review scores? While many critics enjoy the game, they’ve lowered their
ratings because of the outages. If the outages disappear, is it only fair to raise review scores?

Bradshaw: Of course I’m going to say yes, they should raise their scores :). The reviews are up the reviewers. The most we can do is build something we think is truly special, that will excite and exhilarate players. We know we did that here, I think many of the reviewers see that too. Look, it would have been easy for more reviewers to just tank us with the connectivity issues we had. But they didn’t. They want a chance to see the game in action, and I thank them for that, thank them for giving us a chance. I hope they’ll be so happy with what they see that they’ll want to give it the high score it deserves.