Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Eurogamer report that EA-Land, née The Sims Online, is to come to an end. According to a post on EA-Land’s blog, the online world will be entering the /dev/null on August 1st, but for the next three months will be completely free to all players. EA says,

“Since 2002, EA-Land / TSO has attracted a very special group of players (of which you are one) 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.”

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The Sims Online is being shut down and then relaunched and horribly rebranded EA-Land. The previous Sims Online cities are going to be merged into a new map that is reportedly one hundred times larger than the original game, and the entire thing will be free to play. It’s also going to be focusing on social networking, user-generated content, and all that other buzzwordery, as dev Luc Barthelet explains:

Users have now the ability to upload custom content. Like in the original Sims game, the goal is to let you customize the game completely, but in EA-Land you can see and buy the customizations of the other players! Players have already uploaded several thousands pieces of custom content. I suspect that by some time this year, all of the content of the game will have been replaced many times over by custom content.

And the thing is, I bet it works.