You know what else is playable? Simcity 2000, 3000, 4, etc. Sorry, but "playable" is putting your pants on in the morning, especially in the niche of AAA, DRM

You know what else is playable? Simcity 2000, 3000, 4, etc. Sorry, but "playable" is putting your pants on in the morning, especially in the niche of AAA, DRM'd, persistent, service based gaming markets like this. Nobody pays a premium for incomplete services unless those are some top notch services; not services just billed that way and described in terms of reticulated splines. Just because corporations now have the rights to buy and sell concepts that should have passed into public domain decades ago doesn't mean that they really "own" the public awareness, emotional investment and their passions. Rights can be bound by laws and recorded on paper, but you can't put a price on 10 million fans and tell them to suck it up and drop their expectations because they are legally owned. When you buy a franchise like this, you're really buying a responsibility, not a cash cow to be milked until a husk. To EA this is just another product reaching the end of it's life cycle and they're trying to stay profitable while keeping the lights on, and it doesn't matter if that means ripping out half the game and replacing it with anti-features and price tags. I think publishers and "innocent developers just doing what their boss asked" may be the entitled ones here, thinking they deserve a payday because they worked hard bringing you a game that is quite profitable to operate. You know who else worked hard, harder than anyone else? Hitler.