Following the launch of SimCity last Tuesday, EA and developer Maxis have been working the improve server stability for the always-online title. Connectivity issues arose shortly after the game went live, leaving customers unable to play the city-building simulator. Now, despite EA haven taken measures to improve server stability and increasing the number of servers that are used for the always-online connectivity, Amazon.com has disabled purchasing on the digital download version of the title, stating that many customers are complaining about problems connecting to the SimCity servers. More details are included after the jump.
Despite the issues affecting users, SimCity was rated as the best-selling video game on Amazon before the digital version was pulled. The boxed version of the title is still available.
With the international release of SimCity on Thursday, and the load on the servers expected to increase further, EA announced it has disabled several social features of the game to improve stability. Despite expressing confidence that the service would be stable in time for the international release, connection issues reportedly persist at this time.
In an statement on the EA forums, Maxis’ senior producer Kip Katsarelis stated that “this is, obviously, not the situation we wanted for our launch week and we want you to know that we are putting everything we have at resolving these issues.”
SimCity launched on March 5th, and requires constant connectivity to the Origin servers in order to be played.