I don't expect more game companies to stay away from this; I expect them to do this a lot more for PC gaming. Probably not explicitly, but as much as people in /r/technology insists piracy doesn't matter, the companies continue to care. With online games, the need to worry about that largely evaporates.
Instead, I expect companies to put in proper rate limiting, fallbacks, and plan for the ability to spin up extra servers in case of high demand.
They are, but leaving the description at "parts of the game logic" could be taken to mean the servers are being used to offload compute-intensive tasks. Centralization for the sake of performance is understandable, but not allowing offline saves sounds more like centralization for the sake of centralization.
I think that the regional city interactions and global market count as 'parts of the logic'. I agree it's not compute intensive, but it is fairly central to the design of the new SimCity. No reason the region couldn't be locally simulated IMO, however.
I don't expect more game companies to stay away from this; I expect them to do this a lot more for PC gaming. Probably not explicitly, but as much as people in /r/technology insists piracy doesn't matter, the companies continue to care. With online games, the need to worry about that largely evaporates.
Instead, I expect companies to put in proper rate limiting, fallbacks, and plan for the ability to spin up extra servers in case of high demand.