Polygon gave SimCity 9.5/10. Then 8.0. Then lower. The servers were down the whole time.
The Original Review
“SimCity is a masterwork of design restraint, a focused, gorgeous, brilliantly entertaining game.”
Let's talk about the number. 9.5 out of 10. That is 95th percentile. That is Citizen Kane territory. That is the score Polygon assigned to a game that, on the day they published their review, could not be played by a single paying customer because Electronic Arts' servers had collapsed under launch load. The review was conducted on private EA servers under controlled conditions that bore zero relationship to what consumers actually received. This is not a review. This is a theme park preview written by someone who only ever rode the ride when the line was empty.
Then the number changed. 9.5 became 8.0 because, Polygon noted, server issues emerged 'after publication.' Here is a thought: an always-online game with no offline mode, reviewed on private servers on embargo day, will always have server issues 'after publication.' This is not a surprise. This is physics. EA designed a single-player city builder to require a persistent internet connection specifically so it could not be resold, and Polygon's editorial policy required them to publish before the public could log in. The structural conflict here is not incidental. It is the entire model.
The score kept moving. Multiple updates. Multiple apologies dressed as 'corrections.' The original 9.5 was cached by Metacritic, cited in EA press materials, and used to sell copies of a game that was effectively broken at launch. Pitts reviewed a press fantasy; consumers bought the product underneath it. Nobody at Polygon asked the obvious question: if we cannot evaluate an always-online game under real server conditions before embargo, maybe we should not publish a score until we can. They asked it eventually. After the damage was done.
Final tally: one review, three scores, zero accountability. A 9.5 that became an 8.0 that became a footnote, on a product EA was later forced to patch in offline mode — admitting, retroactively, that the always-online requirement was never about the game. Polygon's score adjustments policy exists because this kind of thing keeps happening. The policy is the confession. The math ain't mathing.
