As I said in the "Metro: Last Light" thread, EA seems to be going out of their way to make people hate them.
Ubisoft (who finally seems to have canned the always online DRM) was always complaining about supposedly high piracy numbers, despite the always online DRM. Not surprising: the pirates probably had a much easier time than the buyers playing their games. So what was it good for? It didn't curb piracy (according to their own numbers), but it did succeed in pissing off a bunch of potential buyers, who then passed on your games.
Another thing that publishers can't seem to wrap their head around is that a lot of people don't want multiplayer. I like story driven games which are very hard to do in multiplayer. And I don't care that Jimmy, who lives half a world away from me, is playing the same game as me, and, no, I don't want to talk to him, so what is he doing in my game??? Yahtzee made a similar point (much more eloquently than me) in one of his recent Zero Punctuation vids.
I was never that big into city building games, but I did play some SimCity 2 in my youth and some CitiesXL more recently. With this DRM they just made the decision for me of whether I'd even consider buying this game.
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