Check out G2A's hidden treasures sale to save money on video games:
https://www.g2a.com/n/hiddengamingtreasures

The best part of Sim City 2013, was having a city with 500 people, needing 3 fucking fire stations, and STILL burning down.

Let's call a spade a spade - SimCity didn't "die" - EA killed it because it didn't jive well with their desire to add microtransactions to every one of their titles.

SimCity is the game that taught me I’m partially color blind. I had plenty of context when I played it, but walking past my brother playing it, it looked like he had all industrial and commercial zones. I couldn’t see the difference between the yellow industrial zones and the green residential when I was more than two feet from the screen.

EA made Simcity 5 need online connection to prevent piracy, yet I was having a blast with my pirated offline version. Ah the memories

My late father introduced me to the original SimCity way back in the day and we bought literally every single SIM promulgation ever made. We would spend hours together building cities, then our own separately. In 3000, I would go into his saved cities and blow up rail lines and power plants; he'd go into mine and rename streets I LOVE YOU SON, making me feel like a real piece of crap lol. I remember one of his cities was 70% industrial, all coal and oil-fired power plants, and rail lines everywhere. I told him that was the ugliest community I've ever seen and he just told me, "everyone's working and the factories make money and look at all the electricity I'm making!"

I miss him but I'll always remember how we shared Simcity together.

The problem with the last SimCity was its map size, which only allowed for very small cities.There is a issue with video essays that only take a quick look at reviews from the time, rather than really diving into the topic. You could only build small cities—that was the core problem—and the always-online requirement was just annoying.

Sim City: dies
Cities skylines: fine I'll do it myself
Also cities skylines: dies by its second game

Not sure how the SIZE of the plot of useable land in Sim City 2013 was not mentioned.  This was absolutely the #1 deal breaker for tons of people.  It was so laughably, pathetically tiny.  You could not actually build cities at all, you could build like some zone of a city, or some neighborhood or something, but not a city.  And because the plot of land was so small, everybody had to pack the area up densely, because there was no room for.....room.  Any spacing to make things more breathable was just insanely valuable land you couldn't use, making actual building area even tinier.  And simply having different loadable plots that vaguely connected to each other was not at all a suitable workaround.

Single biggest reason why simcity 2013 failed was the hilariously small map size. If you ignored all its flaws and continued to play you quickly filled the tiny square and there was nothing to do after that.

SimCity 4 was literally my childhood. Gigabytes of mods in store and I especially love making custom airports with third-party mods in it.

June 2003. I was 11 and my dad wanted to reward me after finishing school. "You got such good marks!”. I asked him if I could have a game and we went to the department store. I saw this PC game, SimCity 4, with some buildings featuring the cover. I was already in love with architecture (drawing buildings, building towers with cassette tape cases…), so I picked it and we went back home with it. I still remember that day.

I didn’t become an architect but very much of what I do now is related to cities and urbanism. This game was really a turning point in my life. I play from time to time, but what I really do more often is to listen to its absolutely unforgettable soundtrack, especially the tunes from its expansion, Rush Hour. It’s a way of keeping the vibes alive through this crazy adult life ❤

1. it died because original creators and ideas left
2. it died because The Sims
3. it died because EA bought it and they no longer needed to stay competitive for survival

Regions in Sim City 4 was the best idea Maxis ever had. I had custom regions where small sections were devoted to feeder industry and farm blocks, transportation districts, airports, etc, all caticorner to a megalopolis that exchanged their goods and services to keep the city robust without being over-polluted. As the city grew, I could clean those districts up because the capital that the exchange created would fund export deals off the border of the map.

Building a functional regional economy in a video game...nothing else in gaming ever came close to that. Absolutely phenomenal.

So it's the typical story. A large company acquires a golden goose, then proceeds to absolutely ruin it by getting too greedy - except in this case it kinda happened twice, because shareholders are greedy too

If you were on Reddit during 2012, you would know that the new Sim City did not come "out of nowhere".

Back then, the devs for Sim City did an AMA (ask me anything) where Redditors could suggest features for the new game, stating that they wanted to get it right. Many people gave some great suggestions, but the ones I remember involved large map sizes and being able to play offline. However, based on the release version of the game, they either didn't listen or all the suggestions were kiboshed by EA higher-ups.

Knowing that history, I was not surprised that it flopped hardcore.

The company went public there you go there is the problem

This is the best time for a revival of the franchise.
Almost 2 years and Cities Skylines II still broken...

Imagine a city with nearly 100 population, 5-6 houses and need 2 fire stations, 2 police station and a full fledged power station 😂

You left out another massive problem with the last Sim City: its extremely limited play area. They just didn't give you a big enough space to build your city and you inevitably ended up crammed within a square that didn't allow you to build enough facilities.