SimCity Woes Continue on Mac

Mac owners sometimes complain about being left out when it comes to gaming. However, Electronic Arts clearly has an equal opportunity policy: its launch of SimCity on the Mac has gone as badly as on PC.

The Mac launch had already been put back two months because, in the words of Kip Katsarelis of EA, “we do not believe it is ready for prime time yet.”

Clearly EA will have wanted to avoid a re-run of the embarrassing launch on PC back in March that had so many problems that key features had to be disabled and the game even briefly withdrawn from sale.

Unfortunately the delay wasn’t enough to put things right. Although the Mac release doesn’t appear to have the server-related problems that hit the PC version, “there are a small number of players who have encountered issued with SimCity for Mac.” What proportion of players that involves is unclear, but those affected are certainly kicking up a stink online.

The major problem seems to be installing the game in the first place. EA has produced a FAQ that notes a list of possible causes including:

your Mac OS being set to a language other than the original default (which appears to have affected many non-English speaking users);
you somehow having multiple copies of the game on your Mac (including in the trash);
you having OSX version 10.7.5 of earlier (which is contrary to the promotional material for the game);
you having later revisions of OSX 10.9 (which should, but don’t appear to, work with the game);
you having pre-loaded the game before release; or
there being a problem with your copy of game downloader tool Origin (in which case EA advises using the new Beta edition).

Some of those who have got the game working report other problems including not being able to run the game at high resolutions such as on Retina displays, not being able to get the game running in full-screen mode, and the game itself simply running poorly. EA says it is working individually with players to sort these problems.

JLister