This is true. But I don't think SimCity is really a factor here. The game is a very small chunk in the EA empire. If SimCity was a major issue they likely would have fired the leader of Maxis or someone down there rather than take out the CEO; he was clearly under performing long before SimCity came out.

Right, but surely there must be cases where people actually do tire of being the CEO. He clearly doesn't need the money. It is hard to infer from the press release what actually happened. He likely was fired for poor performance, but it is not impossible that he actually decided himself to leave for his own reasons and the board didn't try to convince him to stay.

Doesn't this mean that any time a CEO decided to pursue other interests he is fired? Sounds like the only way he would go without being fired is retire or it was long planned like with Bill Gates. John Riccitiello might show up as the head a new company very soon and it all his own doing of wanting to leave. The stock price fell very far already and was trending up; seems like odd timing to oust the CEO. I would have expected it to happen a few years ago instead of now.

Wise stuff. Spend billions making it, then cancel instead of a couple more billion to finish. Scrapping it will probably cost half a billion.

If the thing is half built or more, then why cancel it. That is a real waste of money. You don't half do things, you find things that are yet to be started and cut those!

Why do you think this would mean they wouldn't use Intel anymore? Intel is not allowed to prevent Dell from buying their processors; if they owned AMD they can still sell Intel CPU's. Would almost certainly be for different markets, and likely the Brazos stuff specifically.

Actually, we should quarter him in public for such a heinous crime! Imagine sending someone an email that they didn't ask for. I can't think of something worse in the world than doing this. Sometimes perspective helps...

It sounds by your reasoning than anyone that sends real junk mail, you know, in an envelope to your door, should be fined much more. If the fine is 100 dollars for an email, I couldn't see the fine for real life junk mail to be any less than $20,000 per piece of junk mail, given the resources it requires for someone to open the envelope (possibly cutting themselves), lifting the paper to your eyes, determining it is useless, and throwing it in the trash or recycling, and then taking that package to the curb. While spam is a nuisance, be realistic. Popups, advertising online, it is just the way of the Internet and people have accepted it. This is a ridiculous fine. All they should legally be able to do is seize every dollar he earned and an extra 10 k for wasting people's time. At least then they might actually collect the money.

To be free you have to be free to commit crime. This idea isn't making it impossible to commit crime, but you are giving up too much in the hopes of finding more criminals, and turning people into being afraid to commit crime so they stop. That seems to be the goal of this, make detection so perfect that criminals know they will get caught. Sounds like DRM, and we know that has worked perfectly. Why not spend money on reducing the incentive for crime rather than battling criminals. The theory of taking away the incentive (make sure people have access to jobs and homes if they want them) is just as sound as the theory all criminals can be found with a DNA database.

I was not guessing. I was stating a fact. But you are right, it would be possible, just not with this title on this server architecture.

Spawning instances on demand would require a complete re-architecture of the servers that are used for these games. Given no one is buying them anymore, it would be hard pressed to convince management to take this on when they have work to do for games that people will actually buy.