SimCity sells 1.1 million in two weeks

SimCity sold more than 1.1. million copies in its first two weeks of release, publisher Electronic Arts announced today, and about 54 percent of those purchases were made digitally.

The city building game had about as rough of a launch as possible, short of de-magnetizing hard drives and setting screens on fire. But days of near-inaccessible servers and frequent interruptions couldn't prevent players from logging more than 15 million hours since release--which means the average user has spent roughly 14 hours in the city-building game since launch.

Those 1.1 million mayors will all be entitled to one of eight free EA games to make up for the launch difficulties. They won't be entitled to any offline modes, however, as Maxis General Manager made it clear the studio's vision for the game is wholly online.

That the Steam-eschewing title still pulled in more than half of its sales digitally points to a thriving digital market, at the very least.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.