Amazon.com is no longer selling the PC download version of EA’s SimCity and appears to no longer be fulfilling the retail version of the struggling city-building game.

via SimCity no longer being sold by Amazon, warns about server issues | Polygon.

In a surprising move (to me at least) Amazon.com has removed SimCity (2013) from it’s virtual shelves.

Clearly, this is due to the huge problems EA is having with the games servers and it’s players attempting to both download the game and later actually play.

EA or at least Maxis made the decision during SimCity’s development to force the game to always be connected to the Internet in order to play. Even the single player parts of the game. The only obvious reason for this was to limit the game being pirated.

This decision has caused huge problems with getting the game downloaded. Reports of over 4 hours just to download the game was not unheard of. After the player managed to get the game downloaded, they were faced with queue’s just to play single player campaigns. Reports of 30 minutes or more seemed to be the average.

Blizzard saw similar problems when Diablo 3 was released last year. EA claimed before SimCity’s release that they “had it under control”, but clearly, they didn’t.

The fact that a company like Amazon.com has disabled the ability to purchase the game is something I haven’t heard of before. EA is still selling the game on their site.

It’s interesting that EA decided not to include SimCity on Steam.