SimCity For Mac Release Set for August 29th

Mac users who have been waiting for their chance to become mayor of a virtual city will finally get their turn on August 29th when SimCity for Mac debuts.

According to Polygon, on that day users will be able to pick up the city simulation game at full price for their Mac, if they haven’t purchased the game already. Users who purchased the Windows version of the game will be able to simply download the Macintosh version free of charge through the game’s publishers’ Origin gaming service.

SimCity for Mac comes two months after the game’s developer, Maxis, announced that it would be delaying that version of the game because it simply “wasn’t ready for prime time.” As it was due to be released on June 11th, today’s announcement will come as good news for Mac users, who, like Windows users, hadn’t received an updated SimCity title in years.

The previous title, SimCity 4 did make it to Mac users back in 2003, but was plagued with issues from its release, and never received any final updates to address its random crashing, and game breaking flaws. Although it’s likely Maxis’ hope that the launch of SimCity for Mac won’t be marred by bugs as they’ve taken the extra time to create the game, the title’s launch on Windows systems earlier this year was nearly as trouble as the Mac OS version of its predecessor.

Immediately following its launch, the online only game was completely unplayable due to server load. Instead of being straight-forward and responding to calls for the game to be made playable without an internet connection to a server, Maxis and Electronic Arts responded by claiming  that the amount of computing power that the game requires simply wasn’t possible on a single computer alone. Those claims were later refuted by reports from users who noticed that there wasn’t a lot of simulation data being calculated on the game’s servers.

In recent months, the game has become more stable thanks to patches and server updates, however calls for larger playable areas have gone unaddressed.

The Deluxe edition of the game is now available for $59.99. That price includes access to the architecture designs of London, England and Paris, France.