A number of reasons: 1) People pre-ordered, but didn't find out about the crippling problems until after installing it. By that time, they'd opened it. People

A number of reasons: 1) People pre-ordered, but didn't find out about the crippling problems until after installing it. By that time, they'd opened it. People are used to servers being overwhelmed for a few hours right on launch day. After that's passed and the problem persists, the whole thing is too late. 2) EA was refusing refunds of digital downloads. [1] 3) Even if you subscribed to their crap and waited for them to fix it, the game still exhibited crippling flaws which they refused or took ages to address, for example with the game's pathfinding system [2]. I am sure there were other issues that people faced but not being someone who actually fell in to the Simcity trap, I didn't follow it any more closely. In short, the whole 'just don't buy it' attitude does not work as it's a naive view that completely ignores several key parts of the puzzle. Importantly, those key parts of the puzzle all involve the power resting in EA's hands where the consumers have little leverage to affect change. EA already had their money and had disclaimers on not needing to offer refunds, so the approach of shut up and let the problem go away was fine for them. [1] https://help.ea.com/article/returns-and-cancellations https://help.ea.com/article/returns-and-cancellations [2] http://games.on.net/2013/03/maxis-to-address-simcity-pathfinding-complaints-as-more-bugs-are-found/ http://games.on.net/2013/03/maxis-to-address-simcity-pathfin...