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On the other hand, if there's no significant calculation on the server, why would EA pretend they were having massive load problems? Sure, maybe they wanted to get some headlines about 'SimCity is so popular it's having launch shortages', but there's got to be a happy medium between "friendly headlines talking about SimCity's popularity" and "seething EA hatred plastered across the Internet".

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I think it was just poor scalability engineering. They didn't expect that many users on launch and they didn't implement a system that could scale upwards.

They knew exactly how many users to expect, I'm sure. But you aren't going to pay for a solution to handle all of them when you expect the demand to taper off after a few days.

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