Earlier this month, I wrote that Electronic Arts had made an announcement to members of its long-running but poorly received virtual world, The Sims Online, that it was re-branding the service as EA Land.
On Tuesday, however, EA announced on the official EA Land blog that it is now planning to shut the service down altogether.
Only weeks after informing The Sims Online members that their game was being re-branded as EA Land, Electronic Arts said it is shutting EA Land down.
(Credit: Electronic Arts)
"It is with mixed emotions that today we are announcing the EA Land experiment will soon draw to a close," the blog entry read. "Since 2002, EA Land/(The Sims Online) has attracted a very special group of players...and we certainly appreciate your participation in the EA Land community. The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end, and now we will be focusing on new ideas and other innovative concepts in the games arena. We'd like to thank everyone who has taken part in this online community as a unique experience in the virtual world."
According to the blog entry, EA Land will shut down for good as of August 1, 2008.
This is an odd turn of events. Why, for example, would EA go to the trouble of re-branding The Sims Online and then almost immediately shut down its successor?"
EA did not immediately return a request for comment.
However, fans of The Sims Online (TSO)/EA Land were not in a sentimental mood about EA's decision.
One commenter on the blog entry wrote, "I guess EA changed it all to EA Land, taking away the TSO name so they could close it without closing The Sims name."
That's a rather pessimistic view, of course, but it raises an interesting point.
The Sims Online was originally a much ballyhooed follow-up to The Sims, the best-selling PC game franchise of all time--which recently sold its 100 millionth unit. But TSO never caught on and was widely seen as a failed attempt to port the single-player game to an online, multiplayer environment.
Still, EA kept TSO running, even as it was eclipsed by other social virtual worlds, and it limped along with a small membership.
All along, one reason the game never really caught on was because it didn't give users the ability to create much of their own content.
But with its announcement of EA Land, EA promised that users would be able to finally create content.
Well, I guess not. Whatever the reason EA is shutting down EA Land, it certainly does put the period on the end of the rather depressing sentence that was The Sims Online.
A lot of people feel that if EA had decided to really champion the game, it could have been a hit. It had every advantage: Amazing name recognition, the spiritual guidance of master game developer and The Sims creator Will Wright, and an eager audience. But the company never got behind it, and it became a PR nightmare.
And now, finally, it is being put to sleep.
R.I.P. TSO.
For anyone familiar with The Sims Online, the poorly-received virtual world launched by Electronic Arts in 2002, take note: EA is relaunching it under a new name and for a new price: free.
Born as The Sims Online, it will now be called EA Land.
On Monday, Electronic Arts announced 'EA Land,' the latest iteration of 'The Sims Online,' an online version of its massive hit, 'The Sims.' However, 'The Sims Online' never achieved much success and became overshadowed by other online virtual worlds with economies.
(Credit: Electronic Arts)This is a rather momentous move by EA, since it means it is bringing back from the dead--at least as far as perception goes--a game that, while it never really got off the ground, was extremely important in the overall development curve of 3D social virtual worlds with economies.
And while TSO, as it came to be known, never got the massive audiences of its single-player antecedent, The Sims--which came out of nowhere to become the best-selling PC game of all time--it did usher in and initiate a lot of people to virtual worlds.
In fact, there are, to this day, whole communities of people in Second Life and There.com that began in TSO.
Note: My wife now works at Second Life publisher Linden Lab.
One of the major reasons why TSO never took off is that it really didn't give players very much opportunity to create their own content. And that was particularly frustrating to many players, because The Sims creator Will Wright had promised that TSO would offer open content creation.
But now, according to EA, EA Land will allow players to make their own things.
"Like in the original Sims game, the goal is to let you customize the game completely," EA wrote in a note to former TSO subscribers, "but in EA Land, you can see and buy the customizations of the other players."
That means, of course, that there will continue to be--as there was in TSO--a functioning economy. But because players will be able to make more content, that economy could, in theory, have more complexity and depth than that of TSO.
It's probably too early to tell how EA Land will do, but I do have to say that it's unfortunate EA couldn't come up with a better name.
My guess is that EA Land will have a hard time making too much of a dent in the virtual world space. That's partly because it is hard to see exactly where it fits into the mix. Second Life is well established, though it does not have a huge audience; There.com also has a substantial audience; and then there are the kids' virtual worlds, such as Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, and the like.
But you never know. Perhaps the biggest question will be how much marketing effort EA puts into EA Land. If it allows the game to exist on its own without a lot of backing from corporate, then it may wither away with as much fanfare as it arrived. But if EA gets behind it full force, it could be something some day.
- prev
- 1
- next
