Agreed! But having worked at a company similar to EA, I know the developer may have wanted to implement certain things a certain way, but may not have been able to due to corporate mandates. For example, they may have wanted to deploy using AWS, but their CTO demanded they use the in-house infrastructure he has been working on. Obviously just speculation, but things like this happen all the time at large companies where internal factions put their own agendas ahead of the product and users. I would just hold off blaming Maxis or the development team until more is known.
Here's the thing though: they DID use AWS (one of their EU servers is 46.137.165.11). They have no excuse besides poor architecture design for not simply doubling server capacity.
Right, but I'm just saying that there isn't nearly enough information to claim the devs let down the CEO (as the parent comment implied). We don't know why things are failing, or or who made the decisions that let to the problems. We don't even know if they have tried to throw more servers at the problem (I hope so).
I agree that given the narrow scope of the online plain in SimCity, they should have an architecture that scales easily. I hope they do a public post-portem.
What I'm failing to understand is how a company the size of EA could launch a game with strict online requirements and fail to deliver online capabilities.
I think the bigger the company the more likely it is to happen. You may have separate teams in separate locations with differing agendas. One building the game, another managing infrastructure, not necessarily on the same page or with the same goals. Software team will say they want the best user experience. The IT team might be hearing they need to get costs under control, so they are going to try and be efficient and not over capacity. The software guys may have had a passion for single player, but marketing needs them to add features they are not passionate about. They spend less time on and the features end up less robust.
