Sim City 4 Case Study

Sim City 4 ( January 14th, 2003)

Sim City 4 is part of a fairly successful city-building and simulation franchise created in 1989, which in total has sold around 13 million units over its 15 year run. Sim City 4 is the final part in the series. It has been a successful game, and has outsold its successor, 'Sim City Societies' by around 100,000 units even when it was 4 years old in 2007. In 2004 an expansion pack was released, a with more planned, however Will Wright left so the franchise is now essentially defunct. It is a simulation game (hence 'Sim- City') and allows the gamer to create a city using the game's simulator. A user starts with a limited amount of money and has to build a city from scratch (or a few very small ones that come in the tutorials) and has to learn how to make it profitable, providing services such as health and education to the citizens. It is very detailed, with different social classes creating tension that can lead to riots and abandonment.

Developed by Maxis (creators of the successful 'The Sims' Series three years earlier).

The development team was headed Will Wright, founder of Maxis, and consisted of 68 people. It's development was supervised by Electronic Arts, (which had purchased the Maxis design studio in 1997 after they fell into financial difficulty).

The game uses a unique 3D engine, which was a step up from the previous game, 'Sim City 3000' which used a 2D engine and 'sprites' for the buildings. The in-game view can only be seen from five zoom points and four rotational axis. It is a good example of a sandbox game, with no storyline at all. The user has complete control over what happens, and the simulator plays out the results with differing consequences. It is open ended, as new games can constantly be created and only the gamer's hard drive limiting the number of save games that they can have.

The game was published by EA, as it published the previous game in the series which sold 5 million copies. The cover art was designed by EA. It was made for PC and released by Aspyr Media for Mac in June 2003. It has been released in a heavily edited form for the Wii as 'Sim City Creator' re-developed by Hudson Soft, with a similar simulator and engine in 2008.

The marketing campaign was never large. This is because the market for Sim City 4 was well established, having existed for around 14 years, the campaign only had to attract a small new audience.

The audience was mainly males who either played the original and were now in middle age (as shown by the fansite membership) and a fresher audience with the same interest. However, it did not discriminate against females in any way, with female players easily being able to play the game, as there are no gender specific roles or otherwise gender related roles in the game. It was released under the old distribution model, with a distributor sending the game to retailers across the world. There is a strong fanbase for the game, with many modifications for the game created by dedicated users and numerous international fansites and communities, the biggest of which is Simtropolis with 300,000 members.

A teaser trailer was released on the Maxis website in late 2002, which used cinematic graphics to make the game look highly graphical, yet the game's actual graphics were not as good. (Although a full 3D game was proposed it was dropped because computers of 2003 were not powerful enough), which gained a large amount of publicity on gaming websites.