Electronic Arts Cancels TSO
The Sims Online, Re-titled to EA-Land, Sunsets on August 1st, 2008
After 5 years Electronic Arts cancels The Sims Online (TSO), only months after giving it a new name and changing it to a free service.
Electronic Arts announced the sunsetting of EA-Land on the EA-Land blog yesterday. EA-Land was formerly known as The Sims Online, or simply TSO. Released on December 17th, 2008, TSO was the highly anticipated online version of the highly successful game, The Sims. The game was the brain child of legendary developer Will Wright, developed by EA-owned Maxis, and published by Electronic Arts under the EA Games brand.
An online virtual community, TSO allowed players to create an online persona, build a house and engage in various game-like "jobs" and interact with other players. The game was graphically similar to its predecessor, The Sims. It provided a new type of world that focused on social interaction, targeting both male and female gamers.
The game box boasted a plethora of content, reading, "Choose from hundreds of outfits and thousands of appearance possibilities. Includes nearly all the faces, clothes, and objects from The Sims and the first four expansion packs." User-created content, the hallmark of The Sims, was the one missing piece that many users hoped would come.
After spending three months in beta, TSO met with mixed reviews at launch. The active beta test community was already clamoring for bug fixes and feature enhancements, especially user created content. This didn't keep the game's community from growing in leaps and bounds though, creating an online world very different from the primarily sword and sorcery worlds already available.
Despite this growing, active community, by December of 2002 it seemed that TSO was not going to hit its projected membership numbers. While EA had hoped for 400,000 subscribers by the end of 2002, actual membership numbers seemed to be closer to a quarter of that..
The following year saw the launch of There.com and Second Life, 3D online virtual communities that boasted free accounts, the ability to buy in-game currency with real world money, and the holy grail of user-created content. These worlds began to draw Sims fans who wanted user-created content.
On December 8th of 2003, the Alphaville Herald, a player-run TSO online magazine, published an article about an in-game madam named Evangeline. Combined with articles of in-game mobsters using the game's mechanics to enforce their rule, TSO began to receive a lot of negative press.
The game soldiered on, maintaining a following of loyal fans. News of the game faded into the background, and little more was heard about it for many years.
Fast-forward to January of 2008 and new servers dubbed "EA-Land" were opened. EA began moving players from the TSO servers to the new EA-Land servers. On February 19th, free play was added to the game. New life seemed just around the corner, with the promise of user-created content on the way.
It was not to be.
On August 1st, 2008, EA-Land, a.k.a. The Sims Online, will follow in the footsteps of Motor City Online, and Earth & Beyond. Developers will be moved on to new projects. Players will move on to new games. And the lights on the servers will go out forever.
