EA vs Dropbox

As a software engineer, I have had my fair share of bad launches.  I have had my share of great launches.  That is the life of a software engineer.  There are a lot of people criticizing EA for such a bad game launch.  There are those who defend EA and characterize the critics as complainers.  I decided to do a comparison to explain how epic of a failure EA's launch of SimCity is.

	EA	Dropbox
Employees	9,225	237 + one Panda
Revenue (2011)	$3,800 M	$240 M
Platforms	Windows and sometimes Mac	Pretty much all of them
Concurrent Users	Thousands (SimCity)	Millions

SimCity is a single player game.  The "network" play feature is basically saving your city on EA's servers.  Notice I said servers and not cloud, because it appears EA decided not to invest in a cloud based solution.  By storing your saved games on EA's servers, you can....well, I don't exactly know what it lets you do, since you aren't really supposed to install the game on multiple computers.  It does allow you be the mayor of a city next to one of your friends, but you don't need a lot of network traffic for that.  If you think about it, storing your saved games on a server is similar to my idea of storing saved games on Dropbox.  I decided to compare EA's infrastructure with Dropbox's infrastructure.

Dropbox is a cloud-based solution.  The Dropbox team is small, but they make due with the resources they have.  They have 100 million registered users.  I can go from place to place, device to device, and access my files.  Although I am not a power user, I don't ever remember a Dropbox outage.  Dropbox allows sharing of files between users.  Millions of those people maintain a constant connection with Dropbox's cloud.

EA's Lucy Bradshaw has said that thousands of people are playing the game.  EA's Kip Katsarelis seemed proud that these thousands of people are playing longer and are essentially hogging the nine servers that EA had allocated to the game.  You read that right: nine servers!  EA is now scrambling to build new servers to accommodate this load.  They even released patches to disable some of the features to alleviate the load on those nine servers.

Just calling SimCity's launch a failure can seem like its complaining.  Product launchers rarely go off without a hitch.  When you compare EA's infrastructure to Dropbox's infrastructure, though, it shows just how staggering of a failure this launch has been.  EA was not been able to handle a spike to a few thousand concurrent users.  Dropbox regularly handles millions of concurrent users.  Maybe EA should just outsource the SimCity backend infrastructure to Dropbox.