Everybody knows this PR dance by now. Large company screws up (in this case by being willfully misleading about the extent to which SimCity had to be “always online,” then failing to have the server capacity to actually cope with that,) large company showers free gifts on customers in the hope that they forget about it.
EA is no stranger to the process, having incited customer ire more often than most publishers in the past few years. This apology-proficiency is shining through in the list of actually-quite-good games being offered to SimCity players as recompense for the shoddiest of shoddy launches.
Anybody who has activated a copy of the new SimCity or will activate one before 26 March at 06:59 AM GMT (that’s just before midnight on 25 March in PST-land) will get an email before 22 March explaining how to claim one of the following titles on Origin for free:
- Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)
- Bejeweled 3
- Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)
- Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)
- Medal of Honor: Warfighter (Standard Edition)
- NFS Most Wanted (Standard Edition)
- Plants vs. Zombies
- SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition
Throwing SimCity 4 in there as an option is a neat punchline to this whole debacle, I must say.
When you do receive the email about claiming your game, you must do so before 31 March. Otherwise the PR apology dust that brought it to you will take it away again.
So, SimCity owners, is this apology enough?
