Simcity 2013 was a failure of EA, but by mentioning Maxis 11 times and EA only once (and in passing), it's as they give EA a carte blanche to fail without the lowered reputation for future games (which means many people will preorder, and so on)
I think it's a result in AAA development in general being in a slump.
If anything, I'd say Ubisoft (outside of one or two lone bright spots like Rayman) has been worse than EA the last few years, with the rotten cherry of Uplay on top.
After Activision purchased blizzard it has not been the same company.
Also Blizzard's' international presence is very large.
You're conflating the battle.net platform that they have built, which is the launcher, the updater, etc. with concerns that people had over matchmaking and chat support.
Uplay is a horrendous piece of junk that feels like a horrendous piece of junk that's horrible DRM. Nobody talks about chat channels and clan support in Uplay, because the only function Uplay has is to sell you games and stop you from pirating games.
Battle.net serves the same purpose, but it serves it much more gracefully. Apart from some complaints about no offline only mode for Diablo and Starcraft, it's been a pretty quiet system. Even with the new launcher it's pretty respectful to players.
I think it's pretty telling that you talk about specific functions like clan support and how Diablo 3 was a cash grab. It means you're talking about gameplay features, and not about the Battle.net platform at all.
The fact is, Battle.net is pretty quiet from a DRM perspective. You don't feel violated by installing the launcher like I did when I loaded Uplay. It feels like a tool for interoperability across Blizzard instead of an attempt to outsteam steam while screwing you over trying to lock down your games.
Battle.net's launcher got me playing hearthstone, it got me playing HOTS, it let me reconnect with people that I forgot I had on my friends list from when I played WoW. It was a useful tool. This is regardless of how long it took them to get clan support in SC2 or global chat channels or matchmaking concerns or whatever else your pet issue might be. Whatever the case, I didn't feel cheated just by installing it. Whether the games are good or not are different question.
And this doesn't even factor in all the mistakes that EA has made.
And it's that very idea of "we need to stay competitive" that really killed Simcity. Here in capitalist societies, we're sold on the idea competition is great, but it's not, it assumes the fact the rules stay the same and focuses attention on what our "enemies" are doing. We become obsessed with not doing what we do best, but with doing what we think will beat the others. In Simcity's case, it was adopting online connectivity and social interaction despite the fact Simcity is inherently a creative game and not a social one (in fact, unless you're a trash-tier mayor, you've spent time researching city layouts, reading through strategies, and possibly even simulating various algorithms and geometries in matlab or whatnot... whereas in a social game, you'd be spending your time name-calling the other players). Strategies and ideas that emerge from competition focus on trying to capture customers from an adversary, and completely ignores the fact people are complicated, don't like change, and that a company can capture them by just being incrementally "better" in some engineering metric.
Today, it's too late for simcity, but to a new rising city game like skylines, I hope they ignore what "the competition" are doing and just focus on making their fun city building game more fun (e.g. instead of worrying about online, social, or the 2018 version of online-social which will probably be 3d holograms or something, spend time introducing new mechanics like strategic resources, "work from home" algorithms, flying cars, racism / gentrification, etc.)
Need for Speed: Rivals was similar. It was a neat concept, but it revolved entirely around online play that was generally just completely terrible. You get dumped in a map with 1-7 other people, and then you drive around aimlessly hoping that you eventually run into them, which you don't. In the meantime, you're listening to every idiot with a Playstation Camera screaming at their moms for another PB&J, or some jackass swearing the entire time because he thinks he's alone in his room, because there's no way to turn off voice chat in the game whatsoever.
Congratulations, your game is both online (but you can't really tell) and social (but it's actually antisocial).
Simcity is the same way. What if you could play online against other people? I mean… with other people. You could build neighbouring towns. Except you're actually building neighbourhoods because realistically sized cities would take too much server resources. And then you can interact with other cities! By buying or selling resources like garbage pickup, recycling, and power.
Except that the servers didn't work, so online only meant offline always. And the social idea was cool, until some jackass dropped into your region and built a zone that was entirely coal power plants and industrial zones, and polluted the whole region. Or built a city with nothing but power plants, provided power to everyone else in the region, then one day bulldozed everything, pulling the rug out from under everyone else and sending their cities into chaos.
I really hope that Cities: Skylines is successful. It already seems like a far more interesting game than any previous Simcity was, and it has a lot more potential as well. I love the idea of being able to ease congestion by 'work from home' incentives, and it would be cool if they (or modders) could implement that.
For example,
Affinity-omega-to-beta = affinity-beta-to-omega * k1 + (landvalue-total - landvalue-beta) * k2
and,
landvalue(tile) = super.landvalue(tile) + sum-over(all-tiles, (another-tile) -> affinity(race-living-at(another-tile) ) * distance-between(tile, another-tile) )
Or, in colloquial terms, I like you if you like me or if you bring up the land value of my house. And the land value of my house is equal to however they used to calculate land value, and how much I like the race of my neighbors.
It would be amazing (and probably instructive) to see how much gentrification, segregation, and whatnot evolves out of this. Would we see all the races converge to harmony as race becomes a non-factor in calculating land value (because the affinities converge to 1 number)? Or will we see cycles of alpha race at times increasing land value, and at times decreasing it? Or will we see high rates of crime due to increasing population in sectors of eta race? Or will we see long-term oppression where omega race always increases land-value and beta race always decreases land value?
I think that when expectations are set high (most any recent BF release), disappointment is sure to follow.
Maybe it's just me, but for all people like to point out how expansion packs back in the day used to be bad, I don't remember ANYTHING on the level we're seeing with how aggressively they try to milk their customers at the expensive of the experience.
I liked proper expansions where you got a good proportion of a whole game's extra content. I hate DLC where you are encouraged to buy large numbers of small items, because it's a 'death by a thousand cuts' model of sucking way more money out of the player with far less dev effort.
I never buy DLC for any game, on principle. If a game has a lot, I'll reconsider buying the game at all.