oh dear

So SimCity launched in the US yesterday... and appears to have been a bit of a disaster.

The problem, as feared, is that thousands (or hundreds of thousands? millions?) of gamers have all obviously been trying to download and play it all at the same time.  Now if there'd been some way to stagger them (they've staggered countries) or otherwise spread the load in a sensible way they might have had a chance, but as I understand it the game is the best part of 20gb.

Even if 1,000 people are trying at the same time that's 20 terabytes of data to download so you can image the amounts of data if there's more like 100,000 people.  Apparently there have been huge wait times to even get to the start of downloading, let alone downloading or even playing it.

I'm also guessing that a lot of people had to install origin as well so that will also have added to the load.

I recall personally experiencing a very similar issue with Half Life 2 - I tried to install on day one and basically failed as there were just too many people trying to do the same thing.  However when I tried the next morning it was as easy as pie.

You can kinda see the issue - the only times the loads are going to be this sever are at launch.  So if you put in loads of capacity then when you're into the steady-state phase you're probably way over-supplied with capacity so you either need to strip some of it away later, which in itself will likely cause some problems, or planning for the steady-state and simply taking the initial problems on the chin.

Of course that doesn't stop it being any less frustrating for the individuals who, rightly, feel they have bought something they can't actually use.  And that's a particular issue for something like SimCity where it's always been a single-player, off-line game and a game that could still, even in this iteration, work that way.

For me personally I'm obviously just going to have to suck-it-and see.  I should have the game for the weekend and I have the Monday off so hopefully if I'm persistent and I pick my times well I should be able to get it working.  But it's a very popular series in Europe and they've lumped all of us in together, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are similar problems to the US.