Somebody there probably worked at EA previously. Here's the conversation:
"I know, we'll focus on the incredible compute power that only The Cloud can provide! We can say... 'reduce your capex by leveraging our best-in-class simulation engine. Your existing commodity hardware just got a lot more powerful.', or some such bullshit. Whaddyathink?"
"No go. We tried that with Sims 4, and it just pissed off our user base even more. This move isn't going to make friends; best we just rip the band-aid off and avoid fluffy justifications."
They're not even pretending it's some kind of fancy big-computer advantage.