SimCity, released last week, has always-on DRM. You can’t play the game if you’re not logged into Origin and using one of EA’s provided servers. While many in the industry chalked this up as EA’s effort to prevent people from pirating the game, EA and Maxis claimed otherwise. According to SimCity’s publisher, the game has to be online because it is so absurdly complex a gaming computer can’t run it.

EA and Maxis have claimed that SimCity’s “Glassbox” engine actually does most of its computations server-side, which is why you absolutely must be online to play. Unfortunately for this talking point, users from around the web have simply been unplugging their internet to see whether or not this turns out to be true. Reports are rolling in of players enjoying SimCity offline for minutes or even hours, with no negative consequences.

Oh, and then there’s this: An anonymous source from Maxis (one who actually worked on SimCity) contacted Rock, Paper, Shotgun and essentially denied all of the talking points that have been thrown our way since SimCity’s reveal:

“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”

Maxis and EA were supposedly going to respond to that post, but haven’t yet got around to it. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Oh, and in case you’re curious—here’s what the anonymous dev had to say about making SimCity into an offline game:

“It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff.”

Awesome.

[RPS]

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