The Steam forums for the game are filled with people saying it’s lazy that EA didn’t include Steam Cloud support because implementing that is ostensibly as simple as picking a folder and checking a box.
I spoke with two different professional game developers this week who have previously published games on Steam, and I brought up the issue of Steam Cloud and achievement support. As they tell it, it turns out it’s not nearly as simple as those players in the forums believe—but it still should have been within EA’s capabilities, even with a crunched schedule.
Yes, it’s sometimes possible to get it working at a basic level within a couple of hours, provided you’re already using the Steamworks API. But even in that circumstance, the way a game’s saves work might require additional work to protect against lost data or frequent problems with conflicts.
Given that the game doesn’t support achievements or really anything else you’d expect, it’s possible EA didn’t use the Steamworks API at all. (Doing that would have been hours of additional work.)
Sadly, this is not the sort of computer bug players are encountering.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
I’m not giving EA a pass, though. Four years ago, EA put out the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, a 4K upscale remaster of the original C&C games. The release featured a unified binary for the classic games, sprites, and textures that were upscaled to higher resolutions, quality of life improvements, and yes, many of the Steam bells and whistles that include achievements. I’m not saying that the remaster was flawless, but it exhibited significantly more care and effort than The Sims re-release.
I love Command & Conquer. I played a lot of it when I was younger. But even a longtime C&C fan like myself can easily acknowledge that its importance in gaming history (as well as its popularity and revenue potential) pale in comparison to The Sims.
If EA could do all that for C&C, it’s all the more perplexing that it didn’t bother with a 25th-anniversary re-release of The Sims.
While we don’t have much insight into all the inner workings of EA, there are hints as to why this sort of thing is happening. For one thing, anyone who has worked for a giant corporation like this knows it’s all too easy for the objective to be passed down from above at the last minute, leaving no time or resources to see it through adequately.
