The 2013 version of SimCity was a disaster for all sorts of reasons, not least of which that they took game devs and just mysteriously expected them to know how to build and run online services, run databases etc. A friend of mine was working for another EA subsidiary and ended up being parachuted in to try to help save the day. One of his first contributions made a phenomenal difference: He enabled connection pooling to the database servers. They'd done the entirely understandable, naive, thing of just going with the client defaults.