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EA’s Lucy Bradshaw acknowledges SimCity ‘stumbled out of the gate with our service’ (interview)

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 9 min

simcity q&a

When a game sells too many copies at its launch, it’s usually not a bad thing. But with SimCity, it turned into a nightmare for Electronic Arts, because the city-building simulation was designed as an always-connected single-player game. When players overwhelmed the servers on the March 5 launch day, just about no one could play the game for which they had paid at least $60.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.