Remember all the fuss when games such as Assassin's Creed II and Silent Hunter V started introducing server-side savegames as a way to combat piracy? Well it seems that they must have been at least partially successful, because the idea is starting to worm it's way into other developers. In a recent AMA with Reddit users, the Maxis team fielded a question on just this subject with SimCity and tried to assure fans that the system will work even in the event of something like a power outage.

Hey, not avoiding this one. I actually just ran over to our online engineering team to get the latest info. We do handle "short" internet outages gracefully. Meaning, if your internet goes out while you're logged in and playing the game, we can can recover gracefully. You shouldn't notice a thing. "Short" is still being defined.

Unfortunately they didn't say what would happen if your power outage was anything but "short." While the need to combat piracy is understandable, Maxis should realize that this is just another escalation. Eventually the pirates will get around this just as they did with Ubisoft's variation of cloud based saves. Hopefully this latest round won't do too much to affect the game, because there's plenty of people that have been looking forward to the return of the king of the genre.