SimCity Marketing Pulled by EA

[DainBramaged]

SimCity has had its fair share of problems since launch. EA knows this, and they have made the decision to temporarily stop actively promoting the city-building game, at least online.

In a memo sent to affiliates (and obtained by IGN), EA asks for active promotion for SimCity to cease. The company has deactivated all links in Origin’s LinkShare program, which a lot of companies use to promote EA games.

The full memo can be seen below:

"Hello Affiliates,

EA Origin has requested to pause all SimCity marketing campaigns temporarily, until further notice. We have deactivated all SimCity text links and creative and we ask you to please remove any copy promoting SimCity from your website for the time-being. 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.

Sincerely,

Origin.com Affiliate Team"

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/08/simcity-marketing-pulled-by-ea

[Posteritatis]

1. At this point the only reaction I can muster is "point and laugh."

It takes skill and drive and innovation to fuck up an A-list product this spectacularly. Gah.

[Dash87]

2. So disappointed. Sim City 4 was god-like. Why, EA?

I was shocked to see that this was rated 5/10 on Gamespot, and is being pretty much unanimously panned by anyone who played it. If a company like Mojang could have servers for millions of people, how they heck can they screw this up?

Also, why should I need to be online and wait in a queue to play offline? wtf kind of stupid idea is this? Have they ever played a video game before?

[Posteritatis]

3. Mojang let people handle their own servers

All the communication with the company they require is "Do you own this? (y/n)." EA's about control, microtransactions, and turning off the game in a year or two to make people buy the next one.