For what is worth I have observed this phenomenon first hand. I am a college student and I work part time as a sales clerk at a store. I would say at least 20% of the staff consists of retirees. They are usually professionals who either worked for the government or a larger corporation. Everyone who I've gotten to know has some savings and doesn't strictly need to work, but doesn't have enough savings to live comfortably.
What is more interesting is that another 15% to 20% of my colleagues at this store are in their late forties to mid fifties. For various reasons they each decided to abandon their careers (found out they didn't believe in what they were doing, or decided to take time off to look after their kids and could never get back into the industry, etc...)
It is a bit of a specialized store so I am sure it is not the same distribution as in a Target or a Walmart. However it is also worth mentioning that aside from one or two people (who I am not sure about), everyone else has at least a bachelors degree or is in the process of getting one. There are maybe 15 college students out of a staff of about 60.
I played Diablo 3 quite soon after launch and while there were "hiccups" (my character would occasionally jump around due to lag) I could connect fairly quickly to a server. From the reviews the Sim City servers seem to be overloaded much more than D3 servers were.
The always connected to the internet aspect was bad for D3 and it seems it is even worse for Sim City. If I remember correctly, Blizzard had legal problems in South Korea because of connectivity. My hopes is that incidents like this force companies to move away from the online only single player design.
I think that aside from the philosophical problems with DRM in general, the required internet connection aspect means that once EA shuts down the server the game could be lost forever. When making these games (good or bad) a team adds something to the cultural record of our time. Old movies may not be as good as modern movies in terms of technical execution, but they are interesting because they contain within them an aspect of a lost culture. Games should aspire to do the same.
I agree with you in principle but I will suggest that titles which are overly-burdened with bullshit DRM will tend to be less important to the cultural record. I think that's the case here.
C has a bit of a problem with search as well. There is C, C++ Obj-C and C# which all tend to come up in searches. And that is excluding things that can be avoided with additional key words in searches, such as C the default drive on Windows and C as in City Group.
