Who owns SimCity today?
SimCity belongs to Electronic Arts, and Electronic Arts itself changed hands in 2026. The company agreed on 29 September 2025 to be taken private by a consortium of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners in a deal worth $55 billion.
Shareholders approved the buyout on 22 December 2025 at $210 a share. The transaction closed in August 2026, and the stock stopped trading on Nasdaq. Under the new structure the Public Investment Fund holds 93.4 percent of Electronic Arts, Silver Lake 5.5 percent and Affinity Partners 1.1 percent.
So the SimCity trademark, the source code and every Maxis game built on it now sit inside a privately held Electronic Arts. Day to day, nothing about the franchise moved. Maxis still exists as an Electronic Arts studio label, and its work goes into The Sims rather than city building. SimCity has had no new mainline release since 2013, and no successor has been announced.
How a rejected city simulator became a franchise
Will Wright and Jeff Braun founded Maxis in 1987 in California to publish a game nobody else would take: a city simulator with no enemies, no score and no way to win. SimCity arrived in 1989, and players zoned land, laid roads and power lines, set tax rates and watched simulated citizens react.
It sold one million copies by late 1992, split evenly between home computers and the Super Nintendo port. SimCity 2000, released in 1993, moved the grid to an isometric view and added terrain elevation, underground water pipes and arcologies. It sold an estimated 4.23 million copies worldwide, still the high-water mark for the series.
SimCity 3000 followed in 1999 and SimCity 4 in 2003, the latter adding regions where several cities shared commuters and resources. By then the studio was no longer independent. Electronic Arts acquired Maxis in a stock swap that valued it at $125 million, completing the deal on 28 July 1997. Wright stayed 12 years, leaving in April 2009 to run Stupid Fun Club, a think tank Electronic Arts co-owned.
What broke at the SimCity launch in March 2013?
After SimCity 4 the series went quiet for a decade. When Electronic Arts and Maxis brought it back on 5 March 2013, the new game required a permanent internet connection, even for one player alone. The servers could not carry the load.
Buyers could not log in. Those who did lost cities, lost hours and were disconnected mid-game. On 7 March 2013 Amazon suspended the digital download and posted a warning to customers, a step The Register reported the same day. Review sites including Polygon and Kotaku held back final scores and published rolling updates instead.
Lucy Bradshaw, general manager of the Maxis label, offered every buyer a free game from the Electronic Arts catalog and wrote in a March 2013 blog post that the gesture was "a little contrived", adding: "But we feel bad about what happened."
The sales were not the problem. An Electronic Arts press release on 18 March 2013 reported more than 1.1 million copies sold in the first two weeks, the biggest SimCity launch to that date, and by July 2013 the company put the figure above 2 million. The reputation was the problem.
Was the always-online requirement ever necessary?
Maxis had spent months arguing that the new GlassBox engine pushed part of the simulation onto its servers, so offline play was impossible by design. Players tested that claim within days.
A modder using the name UKAzzer forced the game into a developer mode that stopped it quitting when the connection dropped, then played on with no server at all. The Register wrote up the hack on 14 March 2013. A Maxis developer speaking anonymously to Rock Paper Shotgun in 2013 was blunter: "The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing."
That left the online requirement looking like digital rights management with a design story wrapped around it, and the trust never came back. Electronic Arts conceded the point a year later. Update 10, released on 18 March 2014, added an offline single-player mode at no extra cost, with regions saved locally and no cap on save files. It is the reason the 2013 game still runs on a modern machine today, the same way you can run 90s PC games on Windows 11 once the original online check is gone.
Why did EA close Maxis Emeryville in 2015?
On 4 March 2015, two years and a day after the launch, Electronic Arts shut the Emeryville studio that had built SimCity, SimCity 2000, The Sims and Spore. Maxis designer Guillaume Pierre broke the news himself on Twitter that day: "Well it was a fun 12 years, but it's time to turn off the lights and put the key under the door."
The company framed it as a reshuffle rather than a retreat. Its March 2015 statement read: "Today we are consolidating Maxis IP development to our studios in Redwood Shores, Salt Lake City, Helsinki and Melbourne locations as we close our Emeryville location." The Sims work carried on at the surviving sites, and the Maxis name survived with it. The studio with the institutional memory did not.
The timing was cruel in one more way. Cities: Skylines, built by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive, shipped on 10 March 2015, six days after the closure. It sold more than 250,000 copies in 24 hours and passed one million by 14 April 2015, offering the deep, offline, moddable city builder that SimCity buyers had expected two years earlier.
What does SimCity cost now, and will there be a new one?
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition, the version most long-time players still recommend, lists at $19.99 on both Steam and GOG and drops to a few dollars in seasonal sales. SimCity 3000 Unlimited came to Steam on 7 March 2024 at $4.99. SimCity BuildIt, the free mobile entry launched in 2014, is the only part of the franchise still getting new content in 2026.
A new mainline SimCity is a different question. Electronic Arts has announced nothing, Maxis is staffed around The Sims, and the city-building audience it once owned now belongs to Cities: Skylines and its sequel. Anyone hoping for a revival is waiting on a privately held publisher with no stated plan for the series.
Where to find one today: the practical route is digital. SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition runs about $19.99 at list and closer to $4 on sale, and the GOG release is DRM-free, which matters for a 2003 game you want to keep working. Boxed copies of SimCity 2000 and SimCity 3000 still turn up in collectors' hands, but the discs expect hardware that has not shipped in twenty years. Start with the SimCity titles on GOG. For the broader story of studios that outlived their owners, see RollerCoaster Tycoon.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a new SimCity game in 2026?
No. As of September 2026 the last mainline SimCity is the 2013 release, and Electronic Arts has announced no successor. The only SimCity title still receiving updates is SimCity BuildIt, the free mobile game launched in 2014.
Who owns SimCity now?
SimCity is owned by Electronic Arts, which bought Maxis in 1997 in a stock swap valuing the studio at $125 million. Electronic Arts was itself taken private in August 2026 in a $55 billion buyout led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, with Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, so the fund holds 93.4 percent of the company that owns SimCity.
Why did SimCity 2013 fail?
SimCity launched on 5 March 2013 requiring a permanent internet connection, and the servers collapsed under demand. Within nine days a modder had the game running offline, undercutting the claim that server-side computing was necessary, and Electronic Arts added an official offline mode on 18 March 2014.