I didn't care much for the MMO component. I purchased a copy because it had a single player option, and I figured that when I have the cravings for a "Sim City" like game, I'll start it up. That hasn't happened yet so my copy remains unplayed.

The main problem is they gambled the entire game upon the (naive) hope that everyone who bought it would do the pay-per-month and then continue to play the game for multiple hours a day pretty much until the end of time. Without the multiplayer aspect, it almost seems pointless. Building a specialized city makes sense for a multiplayer game, but in solo mode it is just an extremely frustrating limitation.

Then there were the launch issues. Dunno if it has changed since (haven't played it since the week I bought it) but the trading options were laggy as all hell and I think it had a memory leak somewhere (or multiple somewheres) judging by the rate at which it slowed down over the course of the game, with the only solution being restarting the game.

This is a game I really wanted to try, but there was no demo version when it came out. So I just moved on and forgot about it.

Note to publishers who I haven't enjoyed games from in the past. No demo = no sale. (In fact I only heard of Stardock after trying the SoaSE demo, and now I've got several Stardock games.)

Yeah and it was a pain to to play the demo too. Being the kind of person I am, i put symbols in my password with them, guess what, their registery would accept passwords with symbols at sign up but reject them when you tried to login. Took them a few days to clear it up for me, and I wound up playing the demo for about 2 days before I decided no way. You've got a serious problem when you present a city simulation game and decide to leave out mass transit from solo play in hopes of forcing people to pay you per month for buses (trains and etc. weren't even in the game when they pulled the plug).

They're putting out something called Cites XL 2011 but it seems a little iffy to me.

I still believe a city builder can have a multiplayer component and be successful, but I don't think charging MMO prices for watered down content like MC did would ever be successful. What's really bad is steam and impulse and company are still selling this game like its not ending in march. Since Cities XL is one of those games that requires an online account to play, even solo mode, i am not sure if they are pulling that server too or not.

I am not 100% sure, but being able to trade oil and water and get mass transit certainly wasn't enough for an MMO price tag. Emperor had multiplayer trading which wasn't too bad but still a bit of a disconnect. The Settlers series always had some sort of multiplayer in it, right from the first game release in the 90s. It's kind of a city builder.

Really though I was thinking along the line of some friendly competition, liking winning bids and companies. If you are Seattle and you get Microsoft or Boeing to come into your city, then you are going to get some commuters from surrounding cities to go there but not a lot of them want to live there. It would be interesting to see if you had 2-5 people playing with cities connecting to one another how they would evolve side by side. It would never be a quick skirmish but I think a lot of city builders are very patient to play the games in the first place.

I mean Cities XL seemed to introduce an idea that I sort of liked too, cities specializing in stuff instead of just generic industry and resources which, in multiplayer, could make things intersting.

Just saying MC complete failure of this game doesn't mean that city builders can't have multiplayer; it just means you can't slap a MMO price tag on a single-player with a very weak multiplayer component.

Yeah, I didn't know about it until after it closed because I wasn't watching the game very closely until release, when I wanted to try it. Then I couldn't. Never really gave it another look.

What I really want is a proper SimCity 5, or a replacement for that.

Yeah. Darn shame.

Is anyone surprised?  They took out features from Simcity 4 and tried to make you pay a montly fee for it.

I'm betting most people continued playing Simcity 4.