While marred by complications from launch in terms of actually accessing the online servers, Electronic Arts have announced that SimCity has recorded sales of more than 1.1 million copies over the last two weeks, making it their biggest SimCity launch of all time. Roughly 54 percent of those sales have been of digital versions of the game, downloaded directly to players’ PCs via Origin or other digital download services while the other 46ish percent would be from retail copies.
Peter Moore | Chief Operating Officer for Electronic Arts
SimCity had a great weekend with sales strong across both North America and Europe, adding to overwhelming demand at launch that has us tracking well beyond expectations for the game. SimCity is one of the storied brands in gaming, and Maxis delivered a game re-envisioned and engineered for the online age.
EA also shared some interesting stats on player gaming habits over the last two weeks:
- SimCity players have logged more than 15 million hours of online gameplay.
- More than 5.7 million original cities have been created since launch.
- More than 780 million buildings have been built.
- SimCity mayors to date have built enough road and railroad tracks to circle the globe more than 40,000 times.
Maxis also continues to enhance both the core SimCity game and the online service infrastructure; in the last two weeks, they have increased server capacity by more than 400%, optimized server response times by 40 times, and deployed fixes to address players’ direct feedback on game performance.
HOWEVER especially in the first week of the game, due to its “Always Online” requirements the servers were overloaded and this resulted in many gamers having to wait long periods of time to actually begin playing the title – and then suffering from server issues whilst in-game. To make up for this, Electronic Arts are offering a free digital download title from a select list of titles to those who have authenticated their copy of SimCity by the 26th March. While I was expecting some of their older titles to be added to the list (and there are some), they also offer some titles that are <1 year old or actually no more than two months old in at least one case. The digital download titles on offer are:
- Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)
- Bejeweled 3
- Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)
- Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)
- MOHW (Standard Edition)
- NFS Most Wanted (Standard Edition)
- Plants vs. Zombies
- SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition
