Electronic Arts built it — and the people came.
Earlier today, publisher EA announced results for its fiscal fourth quarter. The company missed on earnings but hit its revenue targets. As part of those earnings, the company revealed that it sold 1.6 million copies of the city-building game SimCity.
Approximately half of those sales came directly from digital downloads. That means a lot of people are still purchasing online-only games in physical packaging.
SimCity is the latest urban-management title from developer Maxis. The studio decided to implement an online-requirement for all the title’s functions. Following its March 5 release, server errors plagued SimCity and prevented players from accessing it.
Even once SimCity was working properly, many gamers continued to criticize EA about the inability to play SimCity when not connected to the servers.
That didn’t stop 1.6 million from purchasing the title.