EA Turns The Sims Online Into Free EA-Land, Second Life Competitor
Duncan Riley
17 comments »
EA is relaunching The Sims Online as a free service with a new name and new features, including UGC, commerce and land ownership.
EA-Land is the new, free Sims Online (TSO). The 12 different cities from TSO are being moved to EA-Land and the game area is being expanded to be “100 times bigger than the previous size of any city.” Existing TSO users will be able to purchase land in EA-Land before the new (reincarnated) world is open to the public with paying TSO users becoming “EA-Land subscribers” in a similar fashion to the way Linden Lab charges for land in Second Life.
Users of EA-Land will have the ability to upload custom content and (more importantly) buy these customizations from other players. Sounding a lot like Second Life? It gets better:
We heard from the community that the economy was broken in TSO. That was true, too many users were billionaires, and the goal of the game was mostly about extracting money from Maxis. I can now say with satisfaction that we have fixed the economy on EA-Land. This took many features, from establishing a real estate market, where users can easily buy or sell lots to one another, and a dynamic object pricing market where the prices of objects purchased from maxis is based on supply and demand, enabling stores and entrepreneurs to earn a living. We also enabled users to buy simoleans directly from Maxis. While there is no need for users to do so in the game (we give subscribers simoleans every week), it can help new users build their dream house faster with a simple paypal transaction secured by us.
There is one significant difference though to Second Life: EA-Land won’t become the wild west as EA will be “approving all of the content [so] this user content is safe to be viewed by everyone.”
Second Life fans will point out that TSO/ EA-Land has a lot of difference to Second Life in terms of capabilities, and that is true. And yet really basic 2D service such as Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel have millions of users compared to Second Life’s 100-200,000 regular users over a 60 day period. As much as I hate the name, free is a great selling point and EA-Land has the potential of catering to users who want something more from their online words than the basic services, without the hassles of Second Life.
(in part via GigaOm)
Shame.. it doesn’t seem to be available for Mac. Was just going to give it a go
I am soooooo with #1….
great scoop though, duncan… i’m sure you’re just as disappointed as us…
Really what a lame logo…..are they selling it to a 2 year old!
This seems great! I use to play the Sims and allways wanted to do it online!
I didn’t know there was TSO…
Unfortunately I can’t get it to work because “Sign up” isn’t working…
The name change is rather bizarre. The Sims is a huge brand, the PC bestseller rack of any game store has always held one or two Sims expansion packs for as long as I can remember. This despite the fact that the expansions are rubbish. Basically, there are a large number of people who will buy anything with ‘The Sims’ on it. Unless I’m missing something, no-one buys something because it has ‘EA Games’ on it. If they did EA wouldn’t pay huge sums of money for the Madden/FIFA/etc names.
EA Land is a ridiculous name. And they have ‘under construction’ below the logo. So lame.
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Anyone notice? Looks like they may have “borrowed” the VLC traffic pylon image… looks very familiar to me.
It’ll work on Mac through Cedega, I believe - I noticed a blurb on it while I was looking for Linux options. Of which there appear to be none. *sigh* Maxis games don’t like Linux, even with emulators.
Duncan, what price difference are you talking about here? Basic access is free, while currency and land cost money. How is that different from Second Life?
Having to get content approved for upload raises the barrier to entry for cottage industry, and creates an ongoing support cost for EA. Being able to buy newly-minted currency from EA (rather than from other users in a currency exchange, as in SL) suggests they are going to have an inflation problem down the road. As for claims to have ’solved the economy problem’ … people have been trying to do that for thousands of years; good luck.
Seriously, good luck to them; I’d love to see more competition in this space. But I see some serious pitfalls here, and no obvious win over SL.
I think the new name is stupid. But I am a huge Sims fan. I also use to play TSO, but I never played it enough to warrant the 10 bucks a month. Would love to give this a try. Hope they change the name though?
Was never really a SL fan. Tried it, but there wasn’t much to do….But I DID love flying! Keeps crashing my system though. Don’t know why…
I think the product has potential, depending how its constructed and whom it intends to market to. There seems to be a split-personalty in the current offering. Teens? Adults?
I think these changes would have been profoundly impacting had they occurred years earlier. But EA figured TSO as an MMOG. They, along with most virtual providers, felt the monthly revenue games model was the way to go. I guess they just didn’t do enough objective user testing to understand that their “game” sucked in multiplayer.
Had they seen the nascent promise of the Social Web and virtual worlds (Second Life was just getting started), they might have realized their “game” was almost set to go as such if they would just make some modest changes (allow for user-generated-content - those thousands of user-created objects to get uploaded). Also get rid of the gaming construct as the main reason for logging in and make it just an activity area within the larger social sense. My first confused boring look into Second Life and just thought, The Sims could bury this place if they ever got their act together.
But EA did the right thing. They put their energies into Sims 2 and it made them a lot of money.It’s just having hindsight, you have to wonder.
But making these changes now is not the same thing. Virtual vendors are everywhere, with more sophisticated offerings. The original user-base has probably seen large defections to other venues All that wealth of The Sims content floating on distribution sites is probably only going to see a fraction of it come over to EA-Land unless the revenue model proves itself for selling goods there. Modders too probably have found other places to express themselves and are not going to be so focused on legacy material they left behind.
EA-Land is looking very dated, IMHO. However, its looks remind me of the most successful virtual worlds, those for children: Habbo, Penguin. EA-Land could be rethought of not as an adult setting but a place for older kids who need something more than Zwinkys but who aren’t ready for MTV Virtual Worlds. EA-Land could fit that bill and if done right, might even be able to hang onto these users even as they grow older.
And the retro graphics I think will play well on Mobile devices, which are projected to overtake (already have in some areas) PC and console use. Being as young teens apparently are already biogeneticaly linked to their Blackberries or handsets (”I’m sorry about the phone bill. But Mom, I’ll die if you take it away!” /sob)
If I were EA: streamline the UCG review process to start taking in as much good modder content as it out there and encourage more of the same as they intend to by allowing people to sell it; allow for speculative virtual land for the greedy suckers but give some space away for free; promote social venues including (ala MTV) bringing in real celeberities as guest avatars; let companies come in with free virtual kitsch and maybe pay to set up an activity area; develop activity areas surrounding new EA release titles to promote interest; develop EA-Land as a gateway for product information, patches and hooking up with like-minded players; and monitor social areas to make sure that EA-Land isn’t going to be used for improper purposes.
It’s a sadly commercial suggestion but one that I think will inject the energy necessary to move the virtual mass of this or any social world forward and find users. And once there’s a good and dedicated population base, interesting, self-less, and thought provoking things will follow.
ea-land will probably be available for mac soon! visit http://www.ea-land.ea.com/blog/ for the official blog of the developers and get all the latest news and updates! ea land might seem a lame name , but its an amazing game, so much fun and getting better every week with its updates and bug fixes. Its now in its beta period.