EA's official stance on SimCity's persistent Internet connection has been that it's absolutely required for the core game to function; however, a report from Rock, Paper, Shotgun claims that is not the case. An inside source that asked to remain anonymous told RPS that the online servers are "not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing." According to the source, the servers are coordinating social messages between cities in a region, as well as "cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they're not doing anything."

There are other indications that's true: Even when the servers go down, cities have stayed online and playable, suggesting that the servers are working in the background rather than directly on the main gameplay loop. In fact, says the source to RPS, this is why Cheetah mode was disabled when EA was having such issues. Messages are collected as the game plays, and then passed out in one big package to the servers and back, and losing the fastest play mode was able "to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue."

So could SimCity be single-player? The source claims it undoubtedly could be. "It wouldn't take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff." If that's indeed true, it throws a lot of doubt on EA's current public reasoning about why the game needs to stay online and adds to the frustration regarding the game's launch issues.