Electronic Arts (EA) on Wednesday announced plans to release a Mac version of its new SimCity game on June 11. The company had previously indicated a Mac version was in the works, but this is the first time EA has offered a solid release date.
The game will be available for download through EA’s Origin service and elsewhere. And if you’ve already bought the game for PC, you’ll get the Mac version for free. System requirements weren’t announced.
The new SimCity continues the franchise’s long history of city-building simulations, but this time around SimCity has been remade for a multiplayer experience. In fact, the game requires a connection to EA’s servers in order to operate. That reliance has created a controversy among gamers who find the requirement to be intrusive.
SimCity’s launch was also marred by server problems – first gamers had trouble downloading the game from Origin, then the SimCity servers were overwhelmed with the number of gamers trying to connect, which led to errors and some lost data. EA’s worked hard to smooth out those issues, and the company has sold 1.3 million copies of SimCity to date.
EA noted that SimCity isn’t a slapdash port – this version “runs natively on Mac and its entire software renderer was rewritten for OpenGL, ensuring the best performance for the platform.” Mac gamers will be able to play with PC gamers on the same servers, and gamers who have already created cities, received achievements and placement on leaderboards using the PC version will be able to continue right where they left off on the Mac version.
Love the franchise, but I have no interest in this edition because of the “connected to their server” bullshit!
I know EA doesn’t care, perhaps because Steam is so successful and EA wants to replicate that, but for what it’s worth, I would buy this if it was available in the Mac App Store, but not if I have to go through the motions to install (and live with) an entire secondary online store, account, etc.
Only available if you install Origin, no Mac App store, no Steam, no offline play, no Buy.
Ditto. I don’t get to play games often, so I’ll play every few months, so I’m not confident that I’ll get my money’s worth before EA decides to take the DRM server offline.
Yeah, and it’ll still suck, because fixing their server issues won’t make the simulation any good.
The product is still fundamentally broken (in that it only effectively allows for a small and poorly-simulated city), and is likely to remain that way for some time.
(I don’t really care about “always connected” much, and I totally don’t care about DRM. But I do care about “it’s a crappy simulation.”)
Agreed. I will only buy this if it is on the Mac App store. I have too many online accounts as it is. I bought box copies of the stuff I had on Steam so I didn’t have to deal with it.