> EA couldn't possibly turn a profit if each copy of the game required dedicated beefy-ass server hardware to support it.
I think the charitable interpretation of EA's (fantastical) justification, was that they were planning to have some shared agent-based simulations being run in the cloud (one per "region" — where the whole point of the SC5 "regions" was that they were a sharding boundary for this shared simulation); where your updates to your city would be (asynchronously) incorporated into that shared agentive model; and then the interactions of the agents flowing through that shared model, would get reflected back into your city.
In other words, it wouldn't have been an O(N) computing-power thing, but more like O(N^0.5). Something that would greatly benefit from economies of scale, insofar as a region with 16 tenants wouldn't require much more computation than a region with a single tenant — and likely there'd be a per-region cap on the total number of agents to limit total simulation complexity.
Of course, this isn't what they did; but I think it's what they were claiming they did. Maybe it was even what their marketing department had been misled into thinking they had already done (or would do soon after launch day), because it was something their engineering department had tried to do, but just never got operational "yet".
