They sold server-side processing as a "feature" for what should otherwise be a single-player game. Did anyone not see this coming when it was last discussed on HN?

I remember thinking that the servers were guaranteed to melt on launch day.

I can't understand why experienced gamers would buy it at launch if they expect there to be serious technical issues.

Yeah, it's not even the screw-the-consumer DRM part: I expected that a competent product manager would have said "Hey, our competitors built a city-sim game that was supposed to incorporate a significant online gameplay element, and it didn't go so well for them. What can we learn from this and how can we avoid it?"

So either they didn't ask the question, or they didn't answer it well, or they didn't bother avoiding the problems after they learned it, or they managed to flub it anyway. I'd be curious to know which dysfunction they suffered from.