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EA shuts down the studio behind 'SimCity'

The studio that created SimCity and The Sims is no more. Today, EA confirmed that it will shut down Maxis Emeryville, displacing the folks primarily responsible for the aforementioned titles. In a statement, EA said that it'll relocate Maxis' development to its other offices in Redwood Shores, California; Salt Lake City; Helsinki; and Melbourne, Australia. The company plans to move forward with projects already in the works, including an expansion pack for The Sims 4 and ongoing support for the existing The Sims and SimCity faithful. Those two are massively popular PC titles, and the latter finally arrived on Mac in 2013 with players everywhere encountering a truckload of launch issues.

In fact, the games had a much wider appeal than most, as virtual lives and social experiments attracted players otherwise not interested in the likes of Doom or Wolfenstein. Although Maxis garnered the bulk of the criticism for 2013's botched launch, EA's servers that sort online gameplay and more had a key role, too. At the time, the duo claimed an offline mode wasn't possible, and then a few months later, delivered the feature via an update.

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