Monthly Archives: September 2019

Today's Failure

WeWork is today’s silly startup failure

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So, for those who wonder what WeWork is, it’s someone who did a “I’m going to disrupt some old silly business practice and try something new!” business plan, not a bad idea out of the box mind you, if done properly and with a fair amount of luck.

Now, WeWork target was Office Renting, aiming to create fluid short-term rental agreement with smaller businesses and startups, meaning that small companies wouldn’t have to sign long-term rental contracts tieing them down to specific locations and spaces.

WeWork would essentially be a Serviced Office with Millennial nonsense* and short term agreements bolted onto it.

*By this I mean public “shared” spaces were the renters can easily network and what have you not, Google-style, with Pinball machines and ball-pits and dumb shit like that.

This does ignore the single most valuable reason to own real estate: “Long-term fixed rental income”, which is one of the reasons why renting is such good business, solid income for long terms, with nice deposits in case something goes bad.

WeWork also rents out meeting spaces and all that nonsense, but if you just need a meeting space, there are almost certainly a church, a local clubhouse, a school or some such operations that can offer you the same deal, probably at lovely low prices, sure, it doesn’t look fancy and there’s no Pinball machines, but still, frugality is a good thing.

The real issue here, is the fact that WeWork signs long-term renting agreements on their properties and then rents them out short-term, essentially assuming the brunt of the risk themselves.

Combine that with a whole bunch of rental shenanigans, where the now ex-founder and CEO Adam Neumann would buy buildings and then rent them to his own company, have a bunch of his family on the Board, change the companies name and then pay a company he owned for the rights to use the new name.

Also, massive overvaluation of the company have basically caused the whole company to be owned by Softbank of Japan and the founder and his ilk thrown out of the company.

The problem? Greed basically, hell, Neumann sold his stake just before he announced an IPO, so he almost certainly got his payoff, except to see him in a few years with some other “disruption”.

Oh yeah, and the usual sexual harassment accusations, made even more damning when the company changed it’s policy from “Unlimited Beer” to “Four Beers per day Max”, apparently nobody have told them to just not fucking harass people about their tits and/or lack thereof.

Softbank will either keep the company alive in a massively restructured way or liquidated the shit out of it.

Electronic Entertainment, Features of Failure

This is a nice long list of the many failures of Fallout 76

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Today we cover a great deal many of the hilarious failures of Bethesda Game Studios’ absolutely terrible Fallout 76.

First among it’s many sins, is the fact that is a “Games as a Service” concept, a online multiplayer game that drip feeds content in order to keep players buying severely useless micro-transactions junk in an online store bolted on the game, like some horribly cancerous malignant growth.

A significant chunk of the assets are recycled from Fallout 4, using the same engine, and engine that could be very reasonable described as “hideously outdated” or more accurately as “pre-historic”, except that parts that were reused from Skyrim, the Scorchbeast of Fallout 76 uses the same code as the dragons from Skyrim, including the famous “the dragon is flying backwards” bug.

This game was released as a full price 60 US$, even through it’s just a half-baked multiplayer mod for Fallout 4, mind you, the price started cratering like you wouldn’t believe within days of launch, there was a 12% sale after SIX days on Green Man Gaming, hell, 22 days after the release, you could get Fallout 76 for 40 US$, if that isn’t an indicator for failure, then fuck off you muppet.

BEHOLD!

So many bugs, many of the bugs would be patched out and then somehow back in, for reasons that are explained by the chosen engine: “Creation Engine”, that was shat out from the Gamebryo engine about seven years ago, The Gamebryo engine died back in 2015 by the way and nobody cares about it, the Creation Engine is a freakshow that really doesn’t work anymore.

And then there was the Collector’s Edition, now as a sensible person, I find most Collector’s Editions tremendously silly and very much stupid, so frankly, it was fitting for the idiots to get punished for their total lack of self-control, but on the other hand, customer rights.

This is what the Collector’s Edition looked like, note the bag.

The Edition came with the usual dumb shit nobody sane ought to ever care about and that Canvas bag up in the corner, I don’t mind that one at all, at least it’s a bag, it can always be used as a bag.

This is what the bag actually looked like, lovely canvas eh?

Holy shit, did the fans who bought this massive failure of a game go absoluetly apeshit and with good reasons, this kind of deceptive practices are banned in most civilized countries and even the US, so Bethesda went on DAMAGE Control! Offering no less than FIVE HUNDRED Super-Premium-Cash-Shop-Microtransactions Atoms, which is around five bucks, of imaginary money, for a digital artifact, that doesn’t cost them anything, an ironically wasn’t enough to actually buy the in-game canvas bag, a part of the postman set, cost 550 Atoms, the irony.

This was for the INFLUENCERS! Didn’t do much though.

And of course, the precious Influencers got their little special bag, because we all need more reasons to hate them with a burning passion.

Oh yeah, they did manage to get proper bags out in the end.

In the end, Bethesda finally gave up and actually shipped out bags made of canvas, even after they claimed that sourcing CANVAS was very difficult.

Then on the 23rd of April this very year, they went all out Pay2Win on our arses, releasing “Basic Repair Kits”, that you can only buy for REAL money in the Atom Shop (No, the tiny amounts of free Atom Premium currency you get isn’t enough for anything sane, it’s just used to encourage you to spend, you feeble-minded troglodyte), sure, a drop of “Improved Repair Kits” could fall out of the Random Number Generator, but the odds are stacked against you.

Then the start of September, they released two little extra things on the Atom Shop, a bunch of robots that automatically scavenge the local area for you, giving you a massive advantage in that you can concentrate on other activities rather than scavenging for parts, pretty big in a game about Survival, and a Refrigerator that reduce spoilage of you food with 50%, essentially reducing gathering/hunting for food with, guess what, 50%, again, big advantage in a sodding survival game.

And then on the 25th of September 2019, the T-51b Power Armor collectible helmets, that you can buy in shops if you’re an idiot, are now being recalled, I also wonder why a “collectible” that has a production number of 20.000 can really be called a “collectible”, but no matter, some of the fabric inserts apparently “may” contain mold, well done.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/09/24/20000-fallout-76-power-armour-helmets-are-being-recalled-due-to-health-risk/
Sourced!

And just as a final word on this dismal failure.

Yup, Fallout 76 have pretty much sold bugger all, compared all of the never Fallout games.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/504477/global-all-time-unit-sales-fallout-games/
Today's Failure

The Ferdinand/Elephant is today’s annoyingly named failure

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So before I relentless mock another stupid tank, I’ll just have to briefly explain how the Nazis handle military contracts, which always makes me feel ever so delightful, nothing like explain the contractual competition of the Third Reich to make one feel ever so snugly.

But I digress, the Nazis being giant horrible fans of Social Darwinism, a failed ideology only the mad, deranged and awful still believe in, actually did something that pretty much everyone else also did, put up a couple of companies, give them an objective, let’s say “A super-heavy tank that could kill Metal Gear”, wait, wrong franchise, “A REALLY BIG FUCKING TANK”, and then let them vomit out some prototypes.

The prototypes would compete against each other, Porsche would lose due to their drive train and transmission being goddamn stupid as fuck, and everyone else would generally win.

Porsche had this thing about gasoline-electric drive, which is essentially what modern hybrid cars have today, a gasoline engine driving an electric generator, which then drives electric motors, just without anything even vaguely looking like modern batteries.

Henschel & Son was the company who actually got the orders for the Tiger and the Tiger II, because their transmission wasn’t idiotic as fuck in the 1940’s, even if both of those tanks were notoriously under-powered and had reliability issues out the nose, those problems could be easily placed on the shoulders of Adolf “I like big tanks and I can’t lie” Hitler.

So the Ferdinand, which was it’s initial common name, the official name was Panzerjäger Tiger (P) and the ordnance designation was Sd.Kfz. 184, was basically the leftovers from Porsche’s failed big for the Tiger I.

One of two surviving Elephants, one held by the USA and one by the Russian Federation.

For some hilariously optimistic reason, Porsche had produced a hundred chassis for their version of the Tiger, both proposals used a Krupp turret you see, which with the vastly superior Henschel design being selected, were now just redundant junk.

But Hitler really like Ferdinand Porsche, so somebody decided to use the chassis for a really big Tank Destroyer instead, mounting the Tiger II’s nice big 88 gun (8.8 cm Pak 43 for you massive nerds).

He looks so harmless doesn’t he? He was Adolf Hitler’s favorite big dumb tank designer.

In a remarkable stroke of luck, the hybrid drive system was actually really easy to relocated the front of the chassis, seeing as it’s just a bunch of electrical cables, not a great big stonking drive shaft that needs moving, so the chassis could fairly easily be used for the Tank Destroyer Role.

Ninety-One were made, with an additional three being converted into recovery vehicles, and eighty-nine of them were baptized in fire and failure at the Battle of Kursk, the biggest tank battle of World War Two.

Now, to be fair, the Ferdinand’s gun was really amazing, at range, with support, however, the Ferdinand was slow as piss and kept breaking down and the repairs could only really be done from outside of the tank itself, it also had no machine gun for close defense.

So Soviet Infantry could take them out from the side, it also didn’t help that the Soviets had so many tank it didn’t really matter what the Ferdinand’s Kill/Death Ratio was.

Especially seeing as the massive weight (65 tonnes) required FIVE recovery tanks to pull it and the Germans never had enough of those.

Kurst was a failure and the fifty surviving Ferdinand would be recalled for reworks a few months later, 43 of them being refitted with a better commanders Cupola, a machine gun in a ball mount, improved grates on the exhaust and Zimmerit anti-mine paste (More than a few Ferdinand’s were lost to mines).

Hmm? What? Oh Italy.

The now renamed Elephant would continue to serve poorly to the end of the war, for some awful reason several were shipped off to the Italian theater, nobody bothering to check the freaking bridges and roads if they could handle a 65 tonnes heavy monster of a tank, surprise, they couldn’t, so the Elephants mostly just got stuck somewhere and were used as static defenses for a while.

The Elephant Tank Destroyer, great gun, shit everything else. The story of Nazi Germany in a nutshell. The Elephant I’d argue was an even worse tank than the Maus, mostly because more of them existed.

Today's Failure

The Panzer VIII Maus was a big sodding failure

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The Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus, Mouse on English, was an abomination of a tank, a Super-Heavy tank and one of the few who ever left the drawing table.

Super-Heavy tanks tend to share something in common, they really weren’t that terribly viable as weapons of true mass warfare, expensive and inflexible, most of them were cancelled before they ever reached anything that even vaguely resemble a prototype, most only ever appear on paper.

The Maus was basically a project assembled by piece of technological marvel that Ferdinand Porsche had developed for his proposed version of what would later become the Tiger II heavy tank.

The Tiger II was fairly silly on the grander scale, the Maus was outright fucking stupid on even a smaller scale, 188 tons of massive monstrous weight, ten meters long, three point seven wide and three point six high.

Designed as a breakthrough tank, for a period when Nazi Germany had long ago stopped doing any sort of breakthroughs beyond pointless wonder weapons.

The thing is, the Maus was by no means the biggest tank ever planned by the Nazi, the Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte (Rat) was so large it would have required a shipyard to build, the Ratte would have clocked in at well over a thousand tons, utterly beyond dumb, however, if it had been build, the sheer amount of resources spent on it, would probably had ended World War Two much earlier.

The Maus’ true failure lies in the fact that it actually reached the Prototyping stages, two prototype hulls were constructed, the second of the two were destroyed in the final stages of the war, with it’s turret intact.

The first hull had been dispatched as a support vehicle, but never reach anything important, the Soviet’s mated the intact turret and the first hull together, using 18 cranes to achieve it, mostly for test purposes.

After testing, the only surviving Maus was transferred to the Kubinka Tank Museum, were it remains to this very day.

Don’t stick to your ideas, when it becomes painfully obvious how dumb they are, also when Adolf Hitler think’s it’s a good idea, run the fuck away.

There are holes in the front, from various tests of “How the hell do we fuck this thing up?”
Features of Failure

MoviePass has suffered an ignominious death and it today’s failure

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In the hallowed year of Kafka’s 2011, MoviePass was founded by some guy from the record industry and who cares. It was founded for the usual Startup reason of “disrupting” the way we see Movies in the Cinema.

They started out being basically a website you could get voucher for movie tickets, but later transitioned into the usual standard application methods, that everyone everywhere uses every single day.

At several points in their history, you could get unlimited plans, essentially giving you free movies in return for a subscription, the terms and conditions varied wildly from year to year due to the company being a sodding mess.

Which present the first of many issues this company had, it’s pricing was an absolute mess, some period of it’s lifespan it had Peak Pricing, meaning that sometimes the prices would be higher, sometimes not.

Frankly, I’d love to see the business plan of MoviePlan, it seems to be fairly close to this:

A solid Business Plan!

Shock and Horror! In 2017 MoviePass sold a majority stake of themselves to Helios and Matheson Analytics, a company that sounds like a front for someone living in a Volcano lair.

This was ostensibly done as a method of acquiring data on people’s movie watching habits, it didn’t actually solve the company’s core issue of “How the fuck does this make money?”. Mind you, the founders managed to get out of the mess back in 2018 thanks to Helios and Matheson, purveyors of BIG DATA.

So Pricing was a problem, you know what else? The cinema chains where for some peculiar reason, not terrible happy about this entire venture and resisted it thoroughly, refusing to cooperate, presumably because MoviePass didn’t even bother to ask.

Add in standard security issues and the loss of account data and you’ve got it all.

They even released a couple of movies: American Animals, who reviewed really well and Gotti, which is one of a handful of movies that has a ZERO on Rotten Tomatoes, the user score was 80% favorable at a point, which obviously reeks of review manipulation.

Not that any of it matters, MoviePass died on September the 14th in the Year of Machiavelli of 2019, and nothing was changed at all.

To put this in a nice academical perspective using Osterwalder’s Business Model, MoviePass failed to:

  • Determine Key Partners (Cinemas, movie distributors, movie studios)
  • Cost Structure (What costs use the real money? Whales, lack of usage)
  • Revenue Streams (I have no clue how this mess would even really make money, unless you’re somehow going for the Health Club option, subscribe and never go there)
  • Channels (To some degree, they App ought to have been there from the start)
This is the Business Model Canvas, OBEY!

Failure was inevitable, however, the founders got out without suffering any real consequences, Stacy Spikes is now running a targeted Cinema add company and Hamet Watt has several Board seats and Venture activities.

So that’s the lesson kids, fail your way to success!

Today's Failure

Too Human was Too Failure

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Too Human was a 2008 action roleplay game, that was supposed to merge Sci-Fi with ancient Scandinavian mythology, ignoring the fact that was essentially the entire concept of Marvel’s version of Thor and Odin, in an effort to make money.

Many of the developer’s fans did wonder why Silicon Knights didn’t bother making a sequel to one of their massive successes.

Instead they made a piece of shit.

Let’s Yatzhee do the rest really.

Now, the game was a failure in itself, however, there are another thing coming, a lawsuit. They sued Epic, back before Epic turned out to be anti-consumer monopolist twats, for “delivering a bad engine”, despite the engine being the Unreal engine, wildly recognize for being amazing.

In 2012, the judge order Silicon Knight to to destroy EVERYTHING related to the Unreal engine, which included Too Human and X-Men: Destiny and a whole bunch of dreams that Silicon Knights had had too.

So you can’t actually buy this awful game anymore or the X-Men game either, unless you manage to find a boxed copy somewhere out there, I wouldn’t personally recommend that you do that, and that comes from a person who own Stalin Vs. Martians.

Features of Failure

Chris Grayling is a endless story of failure

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Chris Grayling was born on the first of April 1962 and didn’t really start failing consistently until 1993, where the company he worked for as a manager, failed due to SAT non-payment.

He then lost an election in 1997, losing with a margin of more than ten-thousand, his Tory masters then dumped him in an ultra-safe seat in 1998 and he has remained their ever since, his electorate are mainly made of semi-sentient water fowl.

He then spent nine years (2001-2010) in the Shadow Cabinet, which sounds cool, but really, it’s just the British opposition pretending to be in power, so they can claim they’d “do everything better than the sitting government”, even if they couldn’t. He developed a reputation as an attack dog during this period.

BEHOLD!

He then got caught in the Expenses scandal of the time, he’d maintained a tax-payer paid and tax-payer renovated apartment near to Parliament, even though he live 17 miles away. 5000 £ and an severe embarrassment was the price paid, he’d been attacking Labour politicians about the very same issues at the time.

He then claimed that an area in Manchester, called Moss Side, was just like amazing crime drama “The Wire”, despite the fact that Moss Side had had absolutely zero gun-related deaths and that greater Manchester had reported a 82% drop in gang-related shootings.

In 2010 Grayling failed his way into government and being in charge of the Department for Work and Pensions, he just did the usual Tory nonsense, cuts to job centers and blaming “workshy elements”.

In 2012 he got a promotion, he was made Lord Chancellor, the British Justice Minister/Secretary, his performance was described by Lord Pannick as ” “notable only for his attempts to restrict judicial reviews and human rights, his failure to protect the judiciary against criticism from his colleagues and the reduction of legal aid to a bare minimum.”

He banned people from sending books to prisoners, for no reason at all, no rational reason at least. He manages to increase re-offending rates by spending 400 million pounds more, which doesn’t seem right. Most of his “innovations” during his tenure have either already been abolished or will be next year, even Gove didn’t like his work here.

Dull as shit, easy to fuck up!

In 2015 he was promoted again, this time to Leader of the Commons, but he only lasted until 2016, when he was kicked over the Department of Transport.

  • He refused a request from the Mayor of London to gain control of a rail franchise that really would have been better in their hand, because Sadiq Khan is a labour member.
  • He open his door into a cyclist.
  • He cancelled railway electrification schemes in Northern England, because fuck the North.
  • He didn’t penalize a private company for fucking up a timetable change, because he changed the contract in 2017.
  • Not caring about drones, resulting in the Gatwick airport drone disturbances.
  • He then paid Seaborne Freight 13.8 million £ for emergency Brexit ferries, Seaborne had never run any ferries and didn’t own any, so giving them the contract was dumb.
  • The other ferry companies, the ones with actually experience, got a 28 million £ bonus because Brexit still hasn’t happened.
  • And the new Class 800 trains are delayed and cost to much.

And Chris Greyling for some unfathomable reason remains Minister for Transport and a Member of Parliament. He also really hates being called Chris Failing.

Does he have blackmail material on everyone or something? How the hell does he keep getting elected? Are the water fowls really that easy to dupe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Grayling

Today's Failure

Anglo-Zanzibar War is a short failure

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The reasons for the Anglo-Zanzibar War are the usual British reason: “You don’t have a flag, you are now the property of the British Empire”.

Zanzibar was at the time a sultanate, having been founded by Omani slave traders in 1698, where ironically, they expelled the Portuguese colonists, history is full of little ironies like that.

Zanzibar was ruled by the Omanis until one of the usual dynastic struggles caused the separation, Zanzibar would continue as a sultanate under a cadet branch, with the main branch of the House of Al Said.

As part of the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty of 1890, Britain traded Heligoland, a tiny island in the North Sea full of Germans, in exchange for Zanzibar, become the islands full on protector.

In 1896 Khalid bin Barghash, who had recently become Sultan, tried to assert his independence.

The British didn’t care and declared war. A war that last from: 09:02–09:40 EAT (06:02–06:40 UTC), 27 August 1896.

The Sultan’s Harem, sorry, the Ruins of the Sultan’s Harem

That would be a thirty-eight minutes long war, the SHORTEST war ever fought between nations, resulting in around five hundred Zanzibar casualties, mostly civilians and one wounded British sailor.

The British then installed Hamoud bin Mohammed as the new sultan, the previous one was exlied to Saint Helena, even if he was allowed to return to East Africa much later.

The Zanzibar also lost the HHS Glasgow, a royal yacht, ironically named after the HMS Glasgow, less ironically in fact not at all, named after the City of Glasgow.

See those two things sticking out of the water? Yeah, that’s the HHS Glasgow, this picture was taken in 1912 too.

The lesson learned was don’t fuck with the British Empire prior to World War One.

The Sultanate of Zanzibar ceased to exist in 1964, the last Sultan now lives in Portsmouth.

Today's Failure

Luis González de Ubieta y González del Campillo is today’s glorious and magnificent failure

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Luis González de Ubieta (1899-1950) was the son of a forestry engineer, who joined the Spanish Republican Navy at some point after the end of the monarchy, and remained loyal to the Republic when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, resulting in him being rapidly promoted upwards, seeing as a significant amount of naval officers joined Franco’s Falangists.

Not the best picture, but it’s the 1930’s in a country in chaos

In September 1938, after the disastrous Battle of Cape Cherchell in which the Republican Navy lost a strategically important convoy, he was promoted to Captain-General of the Republican Navy, the equivalent of a full Admiral of the Fleet, commanding officer and all.

Why? Because early that year, in march, Ubieta had successfully commanded his taskforce against Nationalist ships during the Battle of Cape Palos, using the torpedoes of his force, he successfully sank the Heavy Cruiser Baleares, unfortunately, it was to little, to late.

At the time he assumed command the Second Spanish Republic was already losing ground, his victory would mean little, beyond receiving the Laureate Plate of Madrid, the highest military honour of the Republic he so bravely served.

Spanish destroyer José Luis Díez

In January 1939, Ubieta was given command of Minorca, which surrendered in February, under massive pressure from the Nationalists and the locals on the island, hope was lost at this point, resistance was sadly futile.

He fled to France, until the invasion by Germany in 1940, forced him to Mexico, later he would settle in Venezuela.

He the tale could end, but it doesn’t.

At the start of the 1950’s, Ubieta, once in command of a navy, found himself in command of a Panamanian-flagged cattle transport named Chiriqui, sailing the waters of South America.

Franco’s power in Spain was now absolute, he had kept his nose out of World War Two and was awarded by not being invaded and obliterated by the Allies, a smaller Western Betrayal compared to the much larger Eastern Betrayal of the now Soviet Satellites states of the later Warsaw pact.

Luis González de Ubieta, an admiral without a fleet, a sailor without a nation, must have been devastated, knowing that he couldn’t return to Spain without the threat of almost certain execution, knowing that his beloved homeland was suffering under the tyranny of Franco, knowing that the Republic was dead.

I couldn’t actually find a picture of the Chiriqui, but it would have looked fairly similar to this ship.

On the 30th of December 1950, the Chiriqui sunk near the mouth of the river Magdalena in Colombian waters, having ensured the safety of the crew, Ubieta refused rescue.

The Captain goes down with his ship, in his last moments, he seized his destiny and went out as a proper naval officer, it wasn’t under fire, but it would have to do.

And thus Glorious Failure was had.

Games, Today's Failure

SimCity 2013 is just the saddest little failure

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SimCity 2013, from 2013, is not the real name of this particular videogame, it is in fact simple named “SimCity”, this is a lie, SimCity was released in 1989 and is one of the classical bedrock videogames of an entire generation of poor bastards.

It was a massively successful series of video games, all about building a city, supplying it’s inhabitants with services, designing the layout of the city and generally being solid simulators.

The intial 1989 game has been released on just about everything:

  • Acorn Archimedes
  • Acorn Electron
  • Amiga
  • Amstrad CPC
  • Atari ST
  • BBC Micro
  • Browser
  • C64
  • CDTV
  • DESQview
  • DOS
  • EPOC32
  • FM Towns
  • iOS
  • Linux
  • Mac OS
  • Mobile phone
  • NeWS
  • OLPC XO-1
  • OS/2
  • PC-98
  • SNES
  • Tk
  • Unix
  • Windows
  • X11 TCL
  • X68000
  • ZX Spectrum

Not bad eh? In 1993 a sequel was released in the form of SimCity 2000, which I never played as a child, my graphics card couldn’t handle 256 colours, on 16.

Followed in 1999 by SimCity 3000, which sold a million copies in six months, which by 2000’s standard, hell even by today, it pretty fucking good for a niche simulator game. Hell, most sources report that the game end up selling around five million copies by 2007.

SimCity 4 came out in 2003, adding cool features like regions, enabling you to essentially building cities and then zooming out to an over-world, where all the cities you could see would then interact with each other, in a fairly limited way true, but cool nonetheless.

SimCity 4 would sell somewhere around two million copies fairly quickly too. But then came the Sims and basically wrecked everything, combine that with a couple of crap games from Maxis, the developer, and the result was a TEN YEAR GAP.

And then came SimCity 2013, one of the early attempts at “Games as a Service” it essentially shoehorned in a whole bunch of online elements, like cooperative multiplayer and leader-boards and then made the entire game online-only.

SO TINY! SO FUCKING TINY!

“EA wanted to make it more of a platform, an ongoing platform, that they’d sort of build and develop on,” Quigley explained. “And so that […] mandated, kind of, the server and online stuff. Which, in retrospect — I mean, obviously — was the fatal flaw in it.”

Yeah, this was a failure of infrastructure before anything else, a million people logging into the game at once drove the servers into the abyss and EA had to basically go all out fire-fighter to fix it.

The game never really recovered, and worst of all, only sold two million copies, the same as the previous game had, after ten years, EA’s moronic executives obviously expected much more.

Didn’t help that the entire Online component and always online requirement, the developers told the customers that there was server-side calculations involved in the requirement, could be disable totally by removing two lines of code.

And offline mode was introduced in a later patch, the game got a bunch of crap DLC and a moderately okay Expansion.

EA don’t learn at all, Maxis no longer really exists, the Sims is a shell of idiots buying the same expansion over and over again and SimCity?

Go buy Cities Skylines instead.

MICROSCOPIC!