It seems that the negative publicity surrounding the online-only reboot of SimCity has haunted Electronic Arts, as the publisher revealed during an investor call that sales of the game plummeted after its initial launch.
According to Gibeau, 1.1M copies of SimCity were sold during the first two weeks of release, but since then, only 500,000 copies had been sold.
Many factors went into the slow sales, including the disastrous launch, the negative word-of-mouth surrounding the always-online game and the numerous bugs that have yet to be fully worked out to date. It didn’t help series creator Will Wright, who was not involved with the game, called the launch “inexcusable”.
A 3.0 patch is due to be released soon to fix such issues as traffic movement.