Editing EA (section)

===Maxis Software===
Back in the day, Maxis released at least a couple of interestingly weird titles every few years (SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt for example, as well as some licensed titles such as SimTower and SimIsle). Although SimCity was generally regarded as their flagship product, the real moneymaker was The Sims, a dollhouse life simulator game that catered directly to facebook addicted housewives. At its peak The Sims could push expansion packs with nothing but new furniture and wallpaper colors for more than what your typical steam game can get away with calling full price.

The proceeds of this were poured into Spore, a big-budgeted game that was less successful then EA anticipated. Partly this was due to an overly paranoid DRM which resulted in the game becoming one of the most pirated games ever, but mostly it had to do with the game not being very good. While Will Wright had set out with the goal of "evolving" your species over multiple epochs, in practice this turned out to be just a collection of minigames strung together that resulted in a very jarring and unsatisfying gameplay experience that just got in the way of the game's best elements of 3D design.

After Spore, Maxis attempted to return to form with SimCity 2013. However, they learned nothing from the DRM experience with Spore and went so far as to require the game to always be online. In addition, each successive iteration of SimCity had gradually gotten more complex with more features, and 2013 cut many features out and shrunk the maps. Maxis would insist the always on functionality was required but hackers would eventually reverse engineer the game and prove otherwise, leading the studio to release an offline mode update.

If you're wondering what this has to do with teegee, SimCity is a model for [https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/170243/games-simcity many different board games] and had a licensed collectible card game, and the early Maxis non-Sims Sim-games are good sources for anybody looking into game design from a Simulationist perspective. SimCity 2000 in particular was highly regarded for its underlying conway's-game-of-life logic which the later installments neglected.