I’m sure the development team knew everybody was going to hate that so it couldn’t have been a surprise.
The always online requirement was just a form of DRM, and wasn't actually necessary for the game. EA even patched in an official offline mode in 2014.
We can only hope that every app/game that adopts this policy dies an excruciating financial death.
In that case, I do find it morally objective to say the person is "buying" a game. If anything, they're renting the game.
I think you're right, but the misconception comes from the fact that EA actively played up the fact that they were doing work "in the cloud", to make it seem more powerful and advanced of a simulation (and to justify their reliance on the always-on network DRM).
I remember that's what they said, but I doubt it was ever the case. Wikipedia says the cloud functionality "enable[d] cloud saves and multiplayer functionality", and shortly after launch it was determined you could patch the game to run offline for an indeterminate length of time. To me, it was pretty obvious back then that it was purely an attempt at copy protection.
Beyond that, the game was just bad. The simulation just didn't live up to the hype, and while it did have a lot to live up to given its fantastic predecessor, SimCity 4 was old by then, and people expected a big upgrade. Specifically, I remember "sims not living persistent lives but rather going to the nearest available workplace for work and nearest available house after work" (Wikipedia again) as being a huge deal in the community back then. And then there was the limited play area, which was just ridiculous when you consider what people want from these games.
That was bullcrap. Soon after launch a crack showed up that made the game playable without a server connection, for the features that didn't actually need a server connection. EA just lied.
Not to mention that they made an official patch available 1 year after launch that enabled a proper offline mode :)
https://www.eurogamer.net/simcity-can-now-be-played-offline
As for this interview, I guess mr lead designer isn't allowed to be honest by his contract.
But that's the problem: it was really a multiplayer game, sold to a crowd who wanted a predominantly single-player experience. So users were effectively angry from day 1 simply because they were being sold something they didn't want; the fact that this also precluded them from salvaging a bit of entertainment from it (since you'd be booted out even if you had little or no intention to ever interact with other players), was a further slap in the face.
As I understand it, this wasn't the case, and the claims that it was were primarily bullshit to justify requiring always-online access for DRM purposes.
There were some game journalists muddying the waters with some assumptions about it back then, which can make it difficult to get an accurate retroactive historical context today.
While that was the marketing line "simulation so complex it can't run on your PC", I remember there being an offline crack shortly after release and later one of the official patches even enabled it officially.
The server side simulation was a joke. It was mostly an excuse for why the game performed poorly and the cities were so small.