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Sim-Dud?
Lumpish Scholar writes ""The Sims Online" was one of the most anticipated releases of 2002; but (according to this Los Angeles Times story in the Baltimore Sun, "'The Sims Online' sold 105,000 copies, or only about a quarter of the initial shipment in December," and (as quoted in this article in the New York Times), "the company's president, John S. Riccitiello, said the number of subscribers was half what Electronic Arts expected." (Check out Google News for more articles, and a registration-free partner link to the New York Times story.) Meanwhile, the game's customer reviews at Amazon.com have an average rating of only two (out of five) stars."
was I the ONLY one who never played the darn thing in the first place?
Because my wife plays the darn thing non-stop!
There's no place like ~/
Perhaps the business model of 'pay per use' really isnt that popluar..
.bla bla bla" no thanks..
"join our gaming network.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The demographic who play games like "ths sims" are not the same people who play MMORPGs.
People who played The Sims also play "Deer Hunter" and "Solitare" and whatever else came installed on their computers. I doubt there's much crossover to the Warcraft 3 and Everquest community.
Maybe they should have simulated the release of the game in The Sims to see what the outcome would have been. :-)
Sims online sucks.
This explains better than I can:
Flaming Telepath Blog.
Maybe it's because no one wants to pay what you'd expect to pay for a full-fledged RPG when all you get is IRC and a set of meaningless stats that don't actually effect gameplay?
They should be trying to get sales, not subscriptions. If it were like Battle.net, people would be stepping over eachother to get a copy. Pay for Chat? Not bloody likely. Remember Alpha World?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I don't think I could bring myself to pay 5 bucks a month to use a chat room.
When I told him about "The Sims":
"Great, a simulated life for people with no real life."
Kinda summed it all up right then and there.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
... of a rush job capitalizing on customer loyalty from a previous product.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
I guess people want a fantasy to interact in like Everquest or Ultima online. Not something modeled after the real world. Or the people who are addicted to irc and IM chat are probably not game players and would not buy this. The web has tons of chat rooms and communities that are free. No need for sims.
http://saveie6.com/
I think EA (and Microsoft) probably overestimated the number of broadband users.
At 40 bucks a month (at a minimum), Broadband ain't cheap. And though Sims Online is quite fun, it would suck without a highspeed connection. And anyway, The Sims is pretty fun on its own... without dealing with virtual SimTrolls.
-Anthony
"What I ended up doing, before giving up and playing my offline Sims games, was leaving the game running while I went off to do other things around the house," the reviewer wrote. "This game has all the fun of watching your screen saver over and over again."
But what if you have a REALLY cool screensaver.
Real life sucks largely due to the negative influence of other people. Without those other people, you could do what you like. WITH them, you can do what you like only so long as it doesn't offend them. That is why TSO sucked. It mirorred reality a little _too_ closely. -theGreater.
When you play "The Sims" you get multiple people you control, and a whole environment you have a decent amount of control over. You garner people, make two seperate people and make them fall in love, introduce a third to start a fight.
When you add the 'multiplayer' experience, you add in two things that are negative to this style of game.
Loss of Control
and Competition
Now this simple game has become Everquest when that isn't the whole point of the game.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Interact with thousands of real people, doing everyday, real life things.
If I wanted to do that, I would go to work. And then Dinner and a movie.
You say you want a revolution....
people are actually living their lives. But the continued existence of Evercrack et. al. would seem to support the interviewed individuals who complain that it is currently boring and repetitive. I'm sure they'll work on it and in three to six months it'll be Simscrack.
This article is taken from this site. Perhaps this explains its failure to achieve success in our Capitalist society? :)
Until December Stalin's dream of socialism in one country had only been realized in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Late last year the theory took off, spreading into heretofore undiscovered nations named Alphaville, Calvin's Creek, Interhogan and Mount Fuji.
The Sims are now online. It's not just an irritating commercial.
The Sims, in its offline version, is an amusing little simulation of life in which you get to be the star, meeting new digital people, improving yourself and your job, accumulating wealth and a family, building a home and eventually a small community. If you always wanted to be an astronaut with a movie star wife and two kids, you can here. It was pokemon for adults, elegant and surprisingly fun. It's the best-selling video game of all time.
The online version is superficially similar. It looks the same, it sounds the same, it has neighborhoods, housebuilding, social interaction, and skills to improve. But it also has . . . other people. There's where the problems start.
The Sims is a solipsist's game. It has no multiplayer component and needs none, because the "people" who make up the game are really objects, to be moved around at will and cast in a story the player writes. With thousands of other people, some things (chattting, social interaction moves) have been gained, but more has been lost. With a crowd comes a need for the game's creators to control people, and the result is a collectivist's dream. But the Sims Online proves that socialism doesn't work.
Want proof that the Simcity flag is red? Try this: In the Sims Online, your Sim spends her entire life in one city. She is never allowed to leave it. While the promise of building a home is given with one hand, it is taken away with the other. Your Sim starts with a pathetic amount of cash and no ready means of acquiring more. If she builds, her home will be a postage-stamp sized hovel, with insufficient space, poor lighting, no entertainment, bad food, inadequate plumbing, cheap furniture (and not much of it), and little means for the Sim to grow her skills to improve her lot. To have a nice home, she must join a collective. She has to squat on a vacant lot with up to 7 strangers, and only then will the State provide sufficient land on which to build, and enough money pooled to build something worthwhile. If the Sim ever tries to escape this collective, she must leave her investments behind.
You never see a child here. The nuclear family is dead. Online Sims seem to be grown in vats a la Brave New World or The Matrix. They enter the game as fully formed adults. Fully formed in body, but not in mind. Most of these vat-grown Sims are bred to be idiots (perfect proles for the all-powerful state), unable to make adult conversation. My Sim has searched the city for a commons where intelligent discussions can be had, and came up dry in all but two places. But if you want witty banter like "i think U R hot!" or "This place is gay!" or "sucky my meat!" well, you're in luck. In the Sims Online, spelling classes are taught by Prince, and conversational style is dictated by Cartman.
The economy is a basket case. The money, called by the dubious name of simoleans, is worthless. It can't be converted to dollars any hard currency, and there's not much on which it can be spent (a lot of the objects from the original Sims aren't here yet).
There are no real jobs. Where offline Sims could climb the ladder from office boy to mogul of finance, their online cousins are given makework jobs no different from digging and filling holes. To earn their keep they have to carve wooden gnomes, paint portraits of purple zombie women, make telemarketing calls, bake pizza after pizza, solve pointless codes, or bash open pinatas for no apparent reason. Once again, the collective is the model. Sims get more money for carrying out these degrading tasks together. It's not uncommon to see a dozen Sims at identical workstations, filling jar after jar with apple jelly that no one will ever eat. This "cottage industry" model was tried during the Great Leap Forward, when millions of Chinese peasants were ordered to smelt steel in backyard furnaces. The result, as in the Sims Online, was a vast national effort to produce piles of useless scrap.
There is no rule of law, but Sims cannot defend themselves. They are a disarmed populace who cannot own guns. A Sim who builds his "body" skill can bully other Sims mercilessly, performing "piledriver" after "piledriver" on his smarter but scrawnier peers. The victims of these steroid-monsters cannot call on courts or police, as they are unreliable and never respond. The only choice is to run away and be cornered, or to leave the property. It's no wonder there are houses full of Sims working on Nautilus machines in team exercise drills. It took Colonel Colt to make all men equal, but he never heard of Simcity.
Finally, the government endlessly promises that our sacrifices will be rewarded in the future, but it never delivers in the present. The game's creators issue pronouncements that in the future we will have casinos, more land and bigger lots, better clothes, and new ways to enjoy ourselves. But in the here and now, we must continue with mass gnome-carving, collective bodybuilding, and living with strangers in cramped quarters, lest utopia never come.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Sheesh, who wants to play a game that simulates real life? Real life is boring enough without having a boring emulation of it...jeez...It's kind of pathetic having virtual parties,,, why not have a real life party and get drunk? OK OK, not my idea of fun, but still....I don't see why anyone would want to play this game, and pay for it....It's like paying for a graphical chat room.
This game is fun for about 10 minutes. With the orignal (offline) Sims, the novelty aspect of the game was great. It was new, it was unseen before.
With The Sims Online, you basically end up with a graphical chat room. The tasks you perform are repetitive and dull. Each involves clicking on something and staring at the screen until that task finishes or your happiness levels go down far enough to finish it for you. Fix that up, rinse and repeat. All in all, the game ends up being a glorified IRC chat room that you pay for.
The only partly redeemed quality is that you can build your own houses and have people come over, but that is severely hampered by a silly limit on the number of objects you can put in your house, so in the end you end up with lots of money you can't spend after doing all those boring tasks.
Finally, the biggest pet peeve I have with Maxis over this one is the fact that instead of fixing the bugs and finding ways to increase the limits and make things more interesting, they take a sack full o' money from McDonald's to advertise their products and waste development time throwing it in.
That being said, all MMORPG's have problems at startup, and hopefully they can get their act together and make it a decent product. As it is now, I'll stick to IRC.
...Because you had to Pay to Play. Especially when McDonalds and Pepsi was Buying Ad's on it.
If they would have made the thing free but then used the sims game design to sell product placements they probably would have been more sucessful and probably could have demanded more money from advertisers because of the huge turnout of players to the game.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Sooner or later the live-online thing had to max out. Remember, the people who do this can only do one at a time. No one spends 60 hrs a week on UO and ANOTHER 60 hpw on EQ...
Fact is - most of the people who do this are already doing it. The land rush is over. (Excepting Internet growth which is still pretty good, but the land rush is over.)
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Well not only do you have to pay $5 a month or whatever, you also have to have every single expansion pack that has ever been release for the sims before it will work. How many owners of the sims when out and actually bought every expansion pack there is? I'm sure there are many different combinations of expansion packs used. So before you buy the sims online you also have to shell out the cash, or download from KaZaA, ever other expansion pack there is. So I'm sure people are unwilling to pay $60 or $90 on other expansion packs just so they can add another and make it work.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
I played the Sims briefly when it first came out, but it was probably the most boring 'game' I've ever played; uninstalled it after a few days and wished I hadn't wasted my money...
Why should I pay $10 a month for something I do now in real life for free? And I can even get laid in the real world!
www.lonseidman.com
The only reason I didn't buy the Sims Online was because I couldn't justify another monthly bill for a computer game. If the server was free, then I probably would have purchased it (at a higher price even.)
I downloaded the free public beta version of Sims Online a few months ago for my wife as she was an avid Sims player but was becoming bored with the offline versions. After a couple of days of Sims Online, she just stopped playing the Online version because there really was no new concept to the game. It was basically the same offline version with the added chat features, and the chat features really added nothing to gameplay and certainly aren't worth a montly fee.
It would be interesting to know just how bad their losses are (or could have been) given the embedded ads of Intel and McDonalds in the game.
How do you kill people and steal all their stuff in the Sims online again?
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
internet dorks find simulating meatspace interaction with other internet dorks unappealing? The Matrix won't need full fledged VR. It just needs a place to post text bitching.
postmodernsideshow.com
I have to pay $10 a month to play a simulation about real life? Is that pathetic or what?
Yeah, right. Just because some game reviewer calls it "highly anticipated" does not make it so. Just because it gets 300 reviews from hard-core gamers proclaiming it the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread (tm) doesn't make it fabulous. It's just talking heads, so no one should be surprised. No one wants monthly fees.
Why pay $30, $40, or even $50 for a game which you then have to start paying for monthly? I don't have anything against subscription-based games, but I would think that the continuous payments might somehow offset the initial purchase price of the product.
I know most of these MMORPG games give you X months free, but that price sticker on the box in the store contributes a lot to their purchasing decision. It'd be a great deal if they charged $200 for the game and gave you 40 months free, but do you think that such a package would sell?
The cost of entry for an MMORPG should be low-to-free. What about development costs, you say? Raise the monthly rate a dollar or two. Yeesh.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
..from relief. I was seriously worried about The Sims online eating up people's lives. The ordinary Sims game already does that to some people I know, and the worst type isn't the ones who like the "Funny" post "have no life", the worst are people who DO have lives but bungle it all up because they'd rather lead ANOTHER life in a single-player game where they play a character who tends towards being so similar to themselves that it's frightening at times.
So suffice to say, I was pretty freaked at the prospect of a life-eating game of this scale becoming even more life-eating as it made its way into the online-realm, a place notorious for eating the lives of nerds and wives alike (see MMORPGs et al). Glad to see another one of my computers-eat-human-future scenarios fizzle into nothing.
/ Per
For some reason it never really appealed to me. I've watched others play, and perhaps that's the crux. It's one of those things you can't just watch, and have to play for yourself.
*shrugs*
Dunno, but it never made it onto my radar screen.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
The directors of the firm hired to continue the marketing after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked. The marketing has now been completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute.
Is there any room left in that Atari E.T. cartridge landfill?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Seriously though, I do wish I knew someone who played that so I could watch over their shoulder and see how things are. I personally am unwilling to spend the money or time on it, but I have heard (from game dev's of other online games) that what is expected is an advancement in well... simulated reality and the "AI" that goes along with it. Such things would be very useful if refined and augmented for use in MMOG's of the RPG and strategy sort. I wouldn't mind seeing the technology behind it myself but I just can't bring myself to be interested in the actual game. Odd.
I seek not only to follow in the footsteps of the men of old, I seek the things they sought.
Amazon should allow reviews but clearly mark them as opinion and when the product finally comes up for sale, wipe the pre-release reviews and start over. As it is, reviews in these sections are next to useless.
Of course, in this case perhaps they were accurate... The Sims was a boring, boring game and its unfathomable why anyone would have derived any enjoyment from its predictable and reptitive nature. On online version might appeal from a IRC/chat point of view, but otherwise its the same old crap.
Manager: Jim! How come Sims Online hasn't met the expected sales?
Jim: Well, sir, there has been a decline in the number of AOL users. Must be the recession... or something...
Manager: Well Jim you do your part, I'll take the price of the game out of your pay check.
Jim: Yes, sir. *shudders*
* Jim picks up phone, dials number *
Jim: Yes, hello, I would like a subscription for your 8.0 service...
"Why should I pay $10 a month for something I do now in real life for free? And I can even get laid in the real world!"
:)
You hope.
I thought all that was said by Conan the Barbarian!
My sister loves The Sims. She returned The Sims online when she got it for christmas though. She said "I can play the sims and run instant messanger for free. I don't need another bill to pay".
She just hits Alt-Tab like she's flipping through TV stations.
All I have to say is I hope this pay-to-play trend ends quickly. The initial cost of games is already high. I have no desire to pay per month to have access to something I don't know how often I'll have the free time to use. If Battle.net can be free, why can't The Sims online be free?
EA, sadly, has a history of trying to make MMOG and failing. UO is the exception, but then again, EA bought Origin after UO was in production.
Just look at the last two MMOG's they tried to make work: Majestic (dead) and Earth and Beyond (Life support). Granted they were good ideas, but EA can't make the shift in thinking from producing box games to MMOG's. Farming out their jobs to a contractor in india effectively allowed them to get rid of a collective 150 years of online gaming knowledge (Kesmai Studios).
I just don't think they'll get it right any time soon.
You've gotten better at reading inane comments (300)!
That being said, I do play MMOGs as I said above. Yes there's a socializing aspect there, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to battle mutants and warbots in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with Deux Ex style character management than go to the gym in the game and pedal my ass off to up stats. Better to do that IRL than in game anyway.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
I'm a big Sims fan, I bought all the expansion packs, made skins, etc. But I havn't bought The Sims Online yet, and I'm not sure I will. I don't have a lot of time on my hands, since I work full time and go to school full time (and I post on Slashdot.) What I liked about the Sims is you could basically play it from beginning to "end" (meaning you got bored with the character and hit the top) in just a few hours a day for about a week. I'd do this, then stop playing for a few weeks, then create a new character and house and start over. I play way too little to pay $10 a month for something that really doesn't offer this same experience, and I think most "Sims" players are the same, casual gamers.
daed si luap
People like to control simulations of other people, but they don't like having to interact with other real people and not be able to control them. Answer, people like to play god, so make more simgle player god games.
Given that "death by Ebola virus" would probably average two stars in Amazon reviews, that's not very promising.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The only person I know who plays the Sims is my mother. I remember mentioning Sims Online to her, and she didnt get the point. She didnt see why she needed to 'compete' against other people to see whos the best person. She kills her sims probably a half hour after bringing them to life, she just enjoys watching them run around and make toast and whatnot. She does ICQ and chats online with people who play scrabble and other mom-type stuff. She just doesnt get the point of Sims Online.
My point is, this game is popular because it's merely a good old distraction. It's completely uncompetitive and not really goal-oriented, at least to most who play it. You just screw around and watch the people do stuff. It just doesnt fit into the MMORPG genre.
Add that to the fact that it just comes off like another in the long line of Sims cash grabs (they have a whole new game/expansion pack bi-weekly it seems). After plunking down $50 on "The Sims get New Pants(tm)" people get wary. The dead horse has been beaten beyond recognition.
Plus it's just a boring game to most traditional 'gamers' in the first place.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Why?
Because they knew they would have to pay per month for it. Everytime I talk abotu EverQuest, they go off saying i'm an idiot for paying for a game I already payed for. They however, don't know what goes into making a MASSIVE online game and the monthly costs the developers and publishers have to keep paying to keep the servers and bandwidth alive. They could care less, they would just play it if it was free and that is it.
I have concluded that the type of people who play the Sim games, or Myst, or other simple yet addicting games are just the wrong type of people who will simply NOT pay to play these online games. MMORPGs like EverQuest, DAOC, etc have a very technical and geeky and hardcore following who will stop at nothing to slay dragons all day long. To them 10 bux is NOTHING to be a hero with a bunch of other people. Simtype people could care less, they will play a game between watching TV shows, where EQ junkies will just not ever watch TV ever again. They might even be embarrased to be seen online, where the RPG people who dress up in costumes for fan faires feel they are having a blast living their lives.
I expect to see Star Wars Galaxies to be a mixed bag. I think it will be popular because those some AD&D RPG junkies will dig into it, and that alone will be enough to support it, but on the other hand, I think overall the typical "Yah, star wars rox" people who don get into RPGs will stay very far away from it. (Also have 2 die hard Star Wars fans who refuse to even try SWG when it ships, they love online games, but again, they dont get into techincal RPG details, and most importantly, THEY REFUSE TO PAY FOR A GAME MORE THAN THE INITIAL COST.) Sales will probably be about half of what they exepect with that as well, but it will STILL be a success with the geek clubs subscribing.
BUYER BEWARE, I purchased the Sim's online under the notion that I could try it out, cancel my account, and sell the game used on ebay or amazon. Even after canceling my account, the person who bought the game told me that EA said the game was registered to another user. EA is trying to strongarm the used market, and force everyone to buy the game new.
Maxis managed to take the few things that were fun about the original game, (customizability, being able to wreak havok with a large group of Sims 'lives'), and remove any trace of them from the Sims online. A game where you have to spend days of real-world time doing telemarketing and making pizzas to try and save up to buy a virtual refrigerator? This game isn't just dumb or boring, it's sadistic.
" I don't think I could bring myself to pay 5 bucks a month to use a chat room."
Why not? People pay $1.25 the first minute, and $2.50/min after, to talk dirty to each other,on the phone.
Execellent point. Alpha world blew because you had to walk around to find someone to chat with (more work than IRC) and there wasn't any interesting or useful interaction with the world around you. Sims Online seems to be just a better implementation of the same sucky idea.
And yes, I'm bitter that no one ever enjoyed the house I had built out of rectangular blue blocks.
From the NYTimes article, quoting Riccitiello the president of EA:
People complain about the tasks of the Sims Online being repetitive and dull. So make them repetitive and exciting. I think I can cum up with a solution.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
We had a devloper Chat over on www.warcry.com You can find the transcript right here.
For the amount of people that attended it they did ask some good questions and the team that's working on SO are a good fun bunch and answered a lot of questions I was surprised they skipped over like other publishers tend to do. Ala Microsoft on any hard question about Asheron's Call or Asheron's Call 2 during their dev chats.
Maxis just can't get it together with online games. By the time they get something workable, they have already milked the games fans for all they can. The online stuff available in The Sims Online should have been available in the original game.
It's kind of like how they released Simcity 4 with online features that don't work -- Is it just me or are there other people who dig and dig for Maxis' promised online features just to find nothing -- not even a decently designed and coherent website?
~GoRK
Sure we can attribute the Sims' decline to the pay-for-play model or the lack of any moderation in a game played largely by teens, but I think there is a greater, overarching reason for this:
EA simply doesnt care about their customers, and they have no interest in maintaining the loyalty of them.
Anyone who has ever played one of their games knows this. They destroy every multiplayer enviroment by allowing cheats to be used, thus ruining the integrity and playability of their games. They refuse to do anything about cheats, thus cheating paying customers out of money. They outright refuse to help customers who have problems with their software. Many of their gaming environments have been taken over by hackers to which they REFUSE TO RESPOND! (In fact when logging on to multiplayer Red Alert one is met with a hacked ad for the site www.fuckea.com, set up by disgruntled players). They have discontinued the Westwood branch of their corporation in order stop maintainence of their games. Basically they simply refuse to help their paying customers enjoy their game, and in some cases ruin it for them.
I'm not surprised TSO failed, not am I that they used false advertising tactics in order to sell the game (apparently some features such as running a business or a casino are not available to users, yet this is advertised on the game box). This Christmas cash grab just goes on to prove to me how poor the company is, and I for one will not be supporting them at all in the future.
I demand morals and integrity from people, so why should I expect any less from a group of people?
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
I know my girlfriend played The Sims and every expansion that came out. She was a Sim fanatic. When she saw the online version her response was: What's the point?
I'm Famous!
Socom for PS2 I guess is doing Ok but only because Socom is good not so much for the Online aspect.
Help fight continental drift.
I miss the old good days of sims... when it was innovative. my favorite one was the underrated Sim-Life. It was so fun to mutate your animals and see the ecosystem change. It is still incredible how they could model some of the complexity of an ecosystem!
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
It seems that the Sims online missed out on the advancement to create those bonds. Many of the things I heard from players were along the lines of, "well, when you play the sims you have to keep all your sims happy, alive, etc. When you play the sims online you can just live in other people's houses, you don't really have to work to keep your sim alive and happy, and there's really no reward for keeping them alive and happy." I think the sims needs a much more interesting beginning and a much more challenging middle so that, by the end, players who may have become uninterested and less challenged have formed bonds that cause them to stay in the game.
I do security
Wide Open West offers a "limited" broadband option for $15/month on top of your cable service. You're limited to 150Kbps, but your ping times are still good so it isn't that bad.
I don't know what it is like in your area, but around here (Detroit, MI) broadband is starting to become assumed in the "technology-minded" house holds.
She owns the original + all expansion packs, but she became bored with Sims Online 3 days into the free beta test period and went back to the single player.
I was one of the people invted to beta test the game. I would have liked to help, but I could never even run the installer on a freshly formatted and installed Windows box (with only video and audio drivers).
Contacting Infogrames technical support produced a promise for help but I never received any, and I couldn't post on the forums for help because you have to create at least one character in the game first (smooth move EA).
The message boards for the beta testers were filled to the brim with complaints, bug comments and the very annoying artificial limitations that EA decided to place on the game (like only a few hundred objects could be owned per sim house area that caused people at a certain point to be so rich they co no longer buy anything even though they could afford to).
This is another game that should have never shipped. I'm not terribly happy what EA has turned Maxis into. I want the old Maxis back!
The way I see it, is that this game's target customer base, is not the type of person to fork over $50 for a game, nevertheless continue to pay for it over months and months.
The recreational gamer (don't know another word for a non-hardcore gamer) isn't ready to pay that kind of money.
Brendan
In tiny print on the label you have to break to use the game, it says right there that you cannot resell the game to anyone. That right there was enough to turn me off the game entirely... if I hadn't already been so disgusted with the stupidity of EA's customer service that I vowed to never buy another EA game again. ...Ever since the Sims first came out, I was waiting anxiously for the online version. Then it came out... and it's BORING. As others have said, it's nothing more than a big ol' chatroom with a Sims skin on it -- and the chat part of the interface, frankly, sucks.
Since when can't "offline" titles get new content added to make a game more fun. I bought Neverwinter Nights about 6 months ago and I'm still getting new content.
- Sil
"He was a wise man who invented beer." -- Plato
One year ago, I probably would have posted something almost exactly identical to what you posted. I was a college student, and $10 a month to play a game was ridiculous. I couldn't afford it, and I didn't have the time to get my money's worth. I swore that I would never play an MMORPG.
Fast forward to 1-2 months after graduation. I was bored senseless in my after-work hours, and I remembered that an old friend had been trying to convince me to play Dark Age of Camelot.
I now own two DAoC accounts and find it worth every penny. Once you're in the working world, $10/month isn't that much. The cost of buying the game covers development costs, and the monthly fee covers the massive costs of big servers, lots of bandwidth, and (attempting) to provide customer service. It also pays for development of additional content. (Both EQ and DAoC have expansion packs, but they have plenty of content and cool things that have been added to the game even for non-expansion users.) In MMORPGs, patches aren't just bugfixes. They bring new monsters, new merchants, and changes in the gameplaye which are USUALLY neat improvements. (For example, the implementation of in-realm dueling in DAoC.) This is drastically different to most pay-once games where patches are merely for critical bugfixes and rarely add any new content.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
is an expansion pack with 50 brand new ways to torture and kill your Sims when you get bored of them.
--
est modus in rebus
Is that in the Sims you can fast-forward through the boring parts. Okay, you're tired and you have to pee.. tell your dude to sleep, tell him to pee, and then fast forward until it's done and you can get back to doing what you want to do.
In the Sims Online, you have to sit there and watch while your avatar naps, showers, eats, etc. For me, anyway, that's what made it not fun.
- Steve
I think the decreasing sales for the Sims Online experience is indicative (I hope) of the demise of the 'lets-play-together-on-the-web' crap that has come out in the past year or so. I personally play computer/console games to get away from life, which means getting away from my fellow man. I personally would rather play against the computer in any game, as if you play against a fellow human, the chances are your human counterpart is either alot better or alot worse at the selected game than you are. This makes for either a frustrating/boring experience. The computer, on the other hand, uses complex programming to make sure that the computer is just slightly better than you (if you select normal play), which makes me, at least, push myself that much harder to win.
It's a thought that The Sims Online shows us how far we've got to go to accept a true virtual world, in which the point is simply to exist.
The projection of avatars and worlds of Stephenson and Gibson weren't based as a game of any sort, but an environment, and The Sims Online might be trying too hard to be both. As The Sims alone...it's not really a game as much as a management simulator for life. And existing in multiplayer mode, I'm surprised people expected a lot more out of it that a graphical chat environment.
If you read the Amazon reviews, they're split with people either loving it or completely hating it. I'd guess the ones who enjoy it are also the ones who find minutes and hours slipping away in AOL chat rooms. It's not necessarily the same people who play Everquest or any other MMORPG.
I'm not sure The Sims Online is supposed to be a fanatic success to the level everyone expected, but I wouldn't count it completely out yet. It's possible that it holds early groundwork towards a universal, easy-access virtual environment...kinda like AOL back in the early 90s.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
What a stupid game, I have a real life to take care of I don't have time to do the same in a game! If you take away the management stuff you're left pretty much with a glorified chat interface (not a good one at that). Sims was cool for a few weeks, then you start killing the sims, then you'll realize that your real life is probably more exciting. holding virtual parties, kissing other puppets controled by other people, getting married, has an empty feel to it. It's like oh cool! now what? I just don't see how people can find this game interesting.
never deleted the rail gun from the final package. And capture the flag is fun... but no deathmatch?? Come on...
I purchased the game for my kids for xmas, they seem to like it ok and I figgered I'd give it a try, I popped in the CD and installed, but they wouldn't set me up a new account because the serial number had already been used. I called them on the phone and they will not even sell me a new serial number, all I can do is buy a new CD.
This is poor marketing, and they just lost a potential customer. I'm not shelling out another 50 bucks for something I already have.
People play games to do things that they can't in reality. Who wants to hover over poorly-drawn characters who are only permitted to do the most mundane things in life?
105,000 people apparently.
I wonder if the sales are becuase the hardware required to play Sim is pretty beefy, considering the type of people that would play this game. For example: My wife loves The Sims. When it first came out, I put it on the old K6-233, and it was playable. When the second expansion pack came out (Living Large), I had to move it the the Athlon 600. When the 3rd expansion came out, (Hot Date), it became very frustrating waiting on the game to do anything. I haven't even tried the 4th expansion (Vacation), and I might even be missing another expansion along the line. Point is, I need a faster computer then what I got to play Sims.
Where was I, oh yes. Another friend of mine signed up for the online beta. She had a GHz Athlon, and broadband and it was just bearable for her. Now, she isn't the type of person that will go out and buy faster parts to increase the performance of her computer. She would go to Ye Olde Electronice Rip-em-off Shope and buy her computer there. So for her the game would end up costing $800 for a new Dell (or whatever) + $50 for Sims Online broadband + monthly fees, and she can't/won't justify the purchase.
Have people finally gotten tired of playing the sims? Halellujah!
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
The problem mainly is the price and maintenance, with little return of playability. Hardly anyone wants to spend $40 on a game, to pay $10 a month, just to be part of a popularity contest.
Maybe Maxis should admit defeat on their hopes and still try to salvage the game and its current subscribers... Either sell the game as it is with a small or no subscription fee (I wouldn't mind $10 per half, but per month?), or sell the game cheap with a small subscription fee ($10 game at the counter of most stores, like those annoying AOL CDs, and $3.95/mo. to play), or...
Why not sell the game and allow people to setup their own SO servers? If a family wants to have fun, they could start a SO server on a computer, or just lease one from a company for the $10/mo., and they can all play free. Make it so the person controlling the server software can set a public server, or private with passwords.
There's still a lot of potential, but Maxis should have done a thorough test with the game with the public to see what their opinion was. This is not simply The Sims, gone online, it's a totally different game based on The Sims, with different objectives and play.
Not that Maxis would read this, but some food for thought.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
My wife bought the Sims Online shortly after Christmas and became addicted to it. She kept pestering me about it until I bought a copy. We play the game a fair amount and have not had any major complaints. The addition of the McDonald's equipment is rather bothersome since I don't see them lowering the price of the subscription. My wife enjoys working with others and running a successfull house in the game while I usually go for cash. I wouold say about 50% of the time I have the Sims Online running, I am usually looking at webpages or playing MOO2. I will give Maxis credit, they update the game very often. If you report a bug, it gets squashed soon. So has anyone figured out how to get Shadow President to run? I miss that game so....but not enough to drag out a 486 with the correct sound card.
Okay EA were optimisitic and thought that this game was going to generate shedloads of cash for them and be a massive it. It obviously isn't going to do that as it just isn't good enough.
However the article says they've sold just over 100,000 for a revenue of $30 a game for EA plus 40,000 people have subscribed to play the game online for $10 a month.
So total revenue so far is almost $3.5 million and climbing at half a million a month, so although it might not make much cash, it's certainly no Daikatana (or Xbox).
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
Can you play the Sims online in the Sims online?
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
make the service free to play. Give currently paying people credits to use toward future modules - this guarantees you will have people using the new pay for modules.
put real-world advertising in the virtual world
have Pepsi and Coke vending machines
have billboards for Guess jeans
have VW beetles.
most every SIM product should be backed by a real product.
make it paid for by virtual ads that are as prevalent as they are in the real world.
NO POP UPS!!! - unless the sim is using a computer heh.
make it paid for by advertising and you get past the biggest hurdle - getting people to try it.
Then, release modules and open up the code so that other folks can make modules.
keep ownership of the server/service but let the power players play.
comment directly in my journal
It will be the biggest game ever seen, in my opinion. It's gonna take a while. "Sim" players aren't used to the idea of playing online, and I'm guessing most don't have broadband. Of course it's not gonna take off like current online games... those are all geared at geeks. But this will take off, without a doubt, and it'll be around for a long, long time.
Get a real life and quit wasting your time on a life you cant really have. I know in ten years Im going to say I didn't waste months playing games that have no impact on me.
"All I have to say is I hope this pay-to-play trend ends quickly. "
I don't have a problem paying for something. I pay for electricity and internet access, why not for a good online service? The only problem is that the only online service out there that might meet this, Xbox Live!, is already useless. No downloadable content, game stats not normalized vs. hours played (so all the 13-year-olds who can play 6 hours a day are #1), etc.
If I played online in Battle.net a lot, I wouldn't mind paying 5$ cdn a month for it. Or even a little more. If you work it out per day, it's nothing. Per day you pay around 20 or 30$ for rent, and 10$ for food and utilities. What's 20 cents for online play without advertisements, with no cheaters, etc?
"If Battle.net can be free, why can't The Sims online be free?"
Maybe you should tune in to sanity FM. If someone is offering a service, they can charge what they want for it. If it sucks, it'll go away. But there is no way that a service can exist and cost 0 dollars to run, someone pays somewhere. You pay with your eyeballs, and the advertisers who get your eyeballs bankroll your play time. Or perhaps economics wasn't one of your strong points growing up.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
No.
Was I the only one who saw ads for the Sims Online and could not possibly see the point. It's an online version of real life, but with butt-ugly graphics. Picking up women on the computer (and let's face it, that's all the ads ever dwell on) seems to be a completely pointless activity with no reward. This game could only appeal to complete social outcasts who are also not very smart nor discriminating in their entertainment.
Then again, the same could be said for a lot of TV...
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
150Kb/s isn't broadband. Its not bad, but its not broadband.
I get 1.5Mb/s (yes, I really get that speed) down and that isn't really broadband. Broadband starts at 10Mb/s.
150Kb/s is like a "gamers connection". Not fast enough to download anything big, but fast enough to make web surfing pleasurable.
But $15 isn't bad though.
1) Maxis SEVERELY over-estimated the demand. Because of this, there are too many shards and not enough players.
2) Skills dominate the game too much. Everyone has got to keep their skills up, the skills houses dominate the game, to the detriment of other types.
3) The economy was crippled from the get-go. The only real way to make money with a property is to be a money, skill, or cybersex property. Selling isn't implemented, so sales properties are useless. Casino games have been on the back burner forever, so games properties are useless.
4) Wrong priorities. Instead of getting out fixes that can make the other property types useful or fixing the bugs, they spend time on their corporate sponsorships. The ads don't work if there's no players to see them.
5) Ignoring the core audience. Everyone loved the Sims because you got your own house to mess around with. The fact Sims Online is specifically geared AGAINST that model is insane. All the newbies try to start up their own property, so you get UO all over again. The bar for property ownership needs to be much higer. What is needed is a core group of houses and services, instead of thousands of closed or abandoned houses.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
Mr. Riccitiello can go hang out with Mr. Bremen and discuss how they don't really understand their audience because they aren't a part of it. I'm sure Rick would buy him a beer.
Simulating ordinary people can be kindof fun to do, but it's something I'd setup and then go do something else and check back every so often to see how well they're doing. Sorry, it just isn't riviting to watch a simulation of normality.
At least in other MMPORPG's, you have the sense that you're exploring, improving, or possibly just being a prick to someone else. In the Sims, you're watching a character sit around and talk (presumably about how they were sitting around at work). In the single-player game, it's a challenge to try to convince the AI to do something interesting.. in the multi-player game, you can't even do that.
C'mon, even if it were a great game they can't expect people to pay $10 a month forever + deal with annoying advertising + pay 10% upfront. The upfront fee alone could pay for a good game. They need to eliminate the upfront fee and lower the cost to one two hundred bucks, say billed as $10 every three months. Then have the option of paying by being subjected to advertising instead of CC billing.
You can't try to milk profits like this on a product launch. You may think of consumers as thoughtless cows, but even cows will eat fresh grass when they have the option of avoiding your offer of year old cud with complimentary electroshock.
Add a working BFG. Or even just the venerable old shotgun.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
This article gave me the same feeling as that article, as I see two reasons to create an online game:
1. The game will be fun and engaging, people will want to try their skill at playing against/with other people.
2. Why sell a game once when you can sell it over and over again? (The same philosophy behind the original Divx, "Why sell a DVD once when you can sell it over and over again to the same person?")
Well, I think Sims Online falls into the latter category. I also have to wonder who they think plays online game? When I was heavily into MUCKing, I had no social life at all outside of the MUCKs I was on. (My life basically sucked.) If I had had to pay to MUCK, I might have (though I was making pitiful money at my K-Mart and Winn Dixie jobs.) My life was not even close to "mainstream" though, and I think if the majority of people had lives like that then suicide/killing spree statistics would reflect it.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
72% isn't that great, but definitely isn't a dud. It seems the game is much more of a niche item than its predecessors were. Will it be profitable? Only time will tell.
I find it very interesting reading all the comments here about why Sims Online flopped (at least so far). I agree with the comments, but can't help thinking of how markedly this contrasts with the reactions here when the issue of Linux on the mainstream desktop comes up. On Sims people here have a very strong (and appropriate, IMO) end-user view--what do you get for what it costs, how well does it stack up against the competition, etc. But in the Linux case people have an astonishing lack of understanding of what the mainstream Windows want and how they use their PC's from day to day. If the Linux camp really understood their market, they'd have a much better chance of succeeding.
http://www.prod.there.com/what_is_there.html
Back when I was kid you had to get your phone from the phone company..you paid for the phone and then a monthly charge for local and long distance service. The revenue model on the new MMORPG's and the like are aimilar and are the primary reason I refuse to play them. Why should I pay 50 dollars for something that is useless unless I pay them a monthly fee on top of the cost of the game? A better model would be either to work the cost of hosting and maintenance into the initial price of the game or make the software free and charge the monthly fee. I have no problem with companies trying to make money...but there is big difference in profiting from customers and screwing them.
At 40,000 current people paying the $10US a month that is still a nice amount of money each month.
However TSO does point to a couple of things why SWG will also fail.
1) Current MMORPG players don't switch games.
2) Most people know about MOGs and if they were interested would be in them already.
3)SWG is placing heavy importance on trading and Sims Online and 'A tale in the desert' do trade only stuff alot better.
4) A big name does not really matter over the game, considering the vast number of star war games that have sucked and not really sold well.
From the album Songs from the Earth by Son of Sam:
http://www.softcom.net/users/twolter/songsfromt
Unlike the home version, you cannot patch the on-line game to allow nudity and there is no sex. Did they really think the a game would sell without these things? They need to build a privacy mode that is either unrestricted or patchable. May be a peer to peer link for certain areas.
Wrote this in an email to a non-gaming friend this morning (so excuse the lack of proper grammer) and thought I'd share it here as well since I think someone who's reading here who doesn't have a background in gaming might find some nugget of info in it...
--------------
kind of a bad article i think. it makes the bad estimates of EA look like
the industry doesn't have a market...
"...many in the video game industry wonder whether online games will ever
find a large following."
a large following isn't the question, it's finding the right game to tap
into it. there's over 400k people playing EQ alone. there's probably 10
others that have 250k each. all of those people play at least $10/month
to play. the market is there, EA is just having a hard time compelling
people to play online. here's the thing... EA has "the Sims" that is
competing with "the Sims: Online" at the same time. people aren't signing
up to play online when the non-MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) version is
just about as fun. EA keeps releasing new content for the single player
version, so there's really no need, if you're a fan, to play the online
version. they kinda messed up i think.
most other MMO games, you can *only* get the experience online. not so
with the sims. not only that, but the whole genre of what the Sims is
trying to do online is brand new. it's not a "questing" game. it's just
like a large graphical chatroom where you can do other stuff.
the market for online version is odd too. other games (like EQ and such)
try and grab the hardcore gamers. basically, young males that are into
gaming. the sims market is much more broad, lots of ladies, housewives,
casual gamers. these aren't the typical people who are going to start
spending $$ and hours online.
the last thing is probably that the game in itself is kind of flawed. not
flawed really, but maybe it doesn't suit itself to longterm play. they've
sold a lot of copies of the game and the expansions because it's *really*
fun to play for a short amount of time, then it gets old. people pick up
the expansions because they're really fun. this makes the sales numbers
look good and tricks EA into thinking that everyone out there is playing
the game nonstop anyway. the truth is that people have put the game away
on the shelf for the last three months and haven't given it a second
thought. it's not that it wasn't fun, but the longevity isn't there.
but, people get excited for some new content and go pick up the expansion
to get a quick fun hit of the game again. then, after they've seen all
the new widgets and whatnots, they shelve it again.
what EA is going to end up doing is having to add content all the time to
the online version. give people a new fix every month of new graphics,
new items, new functionality. that's one of the advantages of being
online anyway, and most games are moving to that model (Asheron's Call was
the first to do it) once they start doing that, people will stick around,
or at least come back every couple of months to renew their account to see
what's changed.
I ranked the responses in terms of 'most helpful", and read the first 10 responses. 10 out of 10 gave the game 1 star, and most had solid, clear explanations of the problems with the game.
Several mentioned that EA/Maxis are aggressively purging their message boards of anything negative, and will cancel your account for doing it!
What they fail to mention about the Sims online is well, let me paraphrase the great thinker Plato.. Or was it Barry Corbin in wargames 'Sir, we have come to the conclusion your new mmorpg, sucks.' The game is no good, Sims people don't like it.. Non-Sims people don't like it, they half-assed the beta and didn't even have 70% of the functions of the game in place DURING the beta, what did they expect? And who cares anyway COH is coming out soon who wants a REAL JOB online when they can be a superhero... Not me.
I bought 2 copies without waiting for reviews (I always do that, this time I didn't and I lost). That $49.99 x 2, one for me, one for the girlfriend. She bought the book too. It was fun for the first few hours, then you feel an empty lump in your stomach.. that one you feel when they messed up your order in the drive-thru, but you're too far to go back.. Anyhow, look at the trailers, the box, and look at the game content. Not the same, not even close. Some things will never make it in the game (like walking from house to house seamlessly) and some (like casino objects) have been promised for months and months.. The game is obviously not finished, has "LOADING PLEASE WAIT" all over it, and thats for 16-18 stick figure people, unforgivable considering EQ/DAoC, while choppy, handles hundreds of people before it getting choppy. I cut my "free month" short by 10 days, and unsubscribed before they dinged my credit card automatically. Its too bad, because the game looks really fun, it should be a blast. They just released a game that should still be in Beta, and that is unforgivable. I hope it succeeds, but I won't pay to test their game anymore.
insignificant as it may be, why do i need the hassle of another one?
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
I Beta Tested the Sims Online and didn't think it was anything special.
Here are my comments:
- I spent over 60% of my time downloading updates. There were always updates I had to download. At one time Players had to download a 70MB update. This update came from one source (EA). When updates come out
- The Sims world seems to be too homoginized, too politically correct. If you want to add some fun, let players choose if they want to be crime lords. Let players be whomever they want to be.
- The UI isn't too intuitive. People who don't play the Sims have a huge learning curve.
- Finding a place to start isn't easy. There should be some sort of 'want ads' or gathering place for new people.
- Their monthly prices are not worth the minimal gameplay you get in return.
- The game can consume too much of your time. This can become very adicitve for some people.
- What am I working towards? Nirvana? CEO? President? Playing this game is like a cross between watching fish in an aquarium and watching grass grow.
- If this game is to be a Simulation of real life why can't there be variables to have sucess and failures? I'm not able to gather a bunch of investors for a business venture and see if I can used the pooled money to become a mega conglomerate. I want to sell stock! I want to sell junk bonds!
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
It's definitely more fun when you play with a group of people you know. But even then it doesn't last too long.
I played the beta for about a week. Then just lost interest.
....the curious part from what I have read is it sounds like everything thats wrong is exactly what was/is wrong with UO since it was launched...has EA learned nothing?
I have never played the sims but I have thought about it, I have friends that love the game and had hoped to join in when it went online, but it sounds to me like I might not bother now...I had also thought that it was going to be anoportunity to take an already well developed sim charter and move him into a larger world thta sounds as well like its not true.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Answer: We're all waiting for SW: Galaxies. But will the rest of the masses be on the same path?
-- (Score:i, Imaginary)
their target audience doesnt have 50 bucks plus 10 bucks a month to fork over just to play the sims, on top of that, I don't think anyone would pay that.
The only place where I saw a scheme like this work was with microsofts "fighter ace II" or whatever where they gave you the game with a demo for free and for 9.95 you could play on their servers in this global aero-battle arena.
The folks at EA should have done the same. Give the game away for near-free and then get people on the subscriptions.
just my two cents.
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|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
But after being heralded on the cover of Newsweek and on "60 Minutes," the $25-million "Sims Online" has turned into an expensive letdown for Redwood City, Calif.-based EA.
According to the article except above, they paid ~$25 million for the development. So, using your figures, they're 21.5 million in the hole. In 43 months, they will have made back the development costs and broken even.
This doesn't even count what they are paying daily for server costs, or for ongoing development as they desparately try to patch and upgrade the game.
With word of mouth as bad as this game is getting, I'd be *very* surprised if it is still around by the end of the year.
If they added a missle launcher, grenade launcher, rail gun, and BFG to the game I'd buy it in a second. I'd love to rail people from across the city and/or room. It'd also be sweet to spam some grenades into the hot tub when it's full.
Maybe they could add user flown planes like BF1942 so you could turn neighborhoods into craters? This would make the game more enjoyable:)
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Or, at least, a high enough percentage of them are. Apparently I are..am.
Somewhere along the way, marketing people overtook the gaming companies. The marketing people saw the success of Everquest, and determined there was NO WAY TO LOSE if they make their own on-line, subscription based game.
At EA, they took a fantastic single-player game, and cheapened it by putting the same name on a multiplayer avatar based chat room.
My daughter is the real Sims fan in our household. I bought her Sims Online, and she tinkered with it for a few hours before giving up. Her exact words were, "It's a disgrace."
The real tragedy is that those marketing people will still turn out to be correct. After about a year and a half, Sims Online will still be kicking, and will still pull in those monthly fees. It will be marginally better, and will be actively hyping it's new expansion pack.
That's realistic. I've been involved in local politics for years, and all those experiences sound familiar.
Maybe most of the potential consumers realized that all the time spent adjusting the lives of "Sims" could be spent on bettering themselves and producing tangeable results. Then "Sims Online" comes along and they further realized that they don't need an internet connection to show their personal improvements to others. "Wow, there are people outside! Oh, wait you joking right?"
I've played the first Sims game. I was not impressed at all. Sure it was kinda neat, but it had no gameplay.
I think that if they wanted to sell more, they would have had to do a lot of work. I don't mean to sound horrible, but I kinda expected the game to flop, even though i liked their commercials.
EA has a history of stopping services of an online game community when a new verison of a given game has been released to the masses.
For example, I used to play NHL 2002 pretty religiously. However, when NHL 2003 came out, all Online methods (within the game) for NHL 2002 players to play against each other stopped and EA focused on NHL 2003 MP efforts. In addition, all other game updates stopped as well.
Fortunately, there is a Huge community of NHL 2002 players that took it upon themselves to produce up-to-date roster lists, uniform updates, and other tweaks for each season. I also saw that someone created their own Online program to connect players together for NHL 2002 from scratch.
Ever since, I've not been able to play NHL 2002 online (within the game). After seeing EA's stance on producing new games every year and seeing EA screw owners of previous versions of a given game out of being able to play MP Games, I haven't been a fan or bought any more of their sports products ever since.
I'm also investigating something in Battlefield 1942 (another EA game) as well. On the bottom back of the box, there is a blurb that says something to the effect that there will be no more Multi-player support after September 3, 2003.
I'm wondering if this is a NHL MP ploy being used on another product. I've been hesitating buying BF 1942 for this reason. There is a huge community in BF 1942 that is continually growing and will probably be pretty hacked off if EA yanks the BF 1942 master MP servers.
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
"Nobody likes subscriptions"
Repeat a billion times over and over again; maybe the friendly producers will get the message.
I love The Sims and more importantly so does my wife. Why did I not get Sims Online? I tried posting a Ask Slashdot question about this. Basically, there are a dozen MMORPG's that I am interested in. However, I'm not gonna pay a subscription for each one. Making the choice on which one I want takes so much time that I end up not choosing at all.
My suggestion is that all these companies partner up for a subscription service and make it available to a bunch of games. Pay $10/month and be able to play many online games. (assuming you buy the copy of the game)
I like another reply though in this discussion. Look at how well blizzard.net and such do. Sell the game not the subscription.
I can't think of anything more boring than the sims. When I play games, I want to escape reality, not be constantly reminded of the drudgeries of every day life.
My initial thought, would be that this would be a very interesting MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game). Being a former everquest addict myself, the only reason I played as much as I did was because of the social aspect of the game. the social aspect drew you in so deep, as you had to associate yourself with other players, make a reputation for yourself if you really wanted to go anywhere in everquest.
This is where it seems TSO lacks. There's no real need to make a reputation for youself, as there's no need to advance in the game (or so I'd imagine, I haven't actually played the damn thing). I would hope that if EA Games wants to succeed in making the sims online actually make some money for them, then they actually integrate some sort of long term goals you might want to achieve, as everquest did. otherwise, what's the use in playing it?
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
I'm a veteran of Planetarion, another web-based strategy game. Like you, the advantage to me in college was that it was played in 5-10 minute chunks. Each hour I'd quickly "check planet" then go back to what I was doing. Such games are definately more appropriate for college students due to the way their time is structured.
:)
Once you're in the working world, 9-5 is dedicated to work, after that is completely free. In this case, games that take your attention for an hour or so at a time are more practicable and appropriate. (Planetarion and to some degree Utopia, which I played for a little bit, required you to check your account pretty regularly to react to current events.)
Some MMORPGS are definately better than others... EQ was a pioneer, but it has since been eclipsed with much better and well-thought-out games. (Dark Age of Camelot has a lot of similarities to EQ, but differs from EQ drastically in the areas where EQ was weakest, such as economics. DAoC also provides a common goal for each realm, that of battling the other two realms on a given server, whereas EQ has no apparent common unifying goal that I can see.)
That said, coming from a DAoC player - STAY THE HELL AWAY until after you graduate! But it already (fortunately) looks like that was your plan.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Simply stated, online multiplayer gaming is most popular among fairly hardcore gamers. The Sims seems to have more appeal to the Windows solitaire kind of crowd.
I find it quite amusing that Media Giants churn out crap, and then ask "Why are you guys lapping it up?"
It's just like yesterday's article about Star Trek:Nemisis tanking. The "Powers that Be" are creating bucket upon bucket of total horseshit, and expect that each and every one of use should sit around shelling out our hard earned cash to them.
It would be one thing if the effort put into the product/movie/game were above and beyond the level of what else is out there, but it seems they continually just try to get away with "good enough". This works for a bit, but sooner or later they cook up a stinker. The trouble with that is, when "good enough" turns out to be utter sludge, they don't understand why everyone bought into the last dumbass one but not this one.
I think it is quite a refreshing thought that there actually is a limit that the "joe everybody" can hit in relation to recycled plot/graphics/gameplay. People won't suck back shit forever. Hazaa, there is sunshine on the other side of the cloud!
just my 2 cents.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
"Hate to break it to you, but 250,000 * $50 = $12.5 million. That means you need to keep your 50K subscribers around for over two years to make as much money as you would selling your game to the wider audience of people not willing to pay per month."
$0 * 1,000,000 $50 * 5,000. That's right, even 5,000 people who are willing to pay will bring in more than millions of people who don't want to pay. You can't get a box out to a store without paying for shipping and the store itself -- sales people aren't free. To further reduce that profit by charging a lower box fee means you have to make more off of the service, otherwise you'll start losing money quickly. Or you could charge more for the box, but then less people will buy it. It's a complex balancing act you seem to have little understanding of.
You're also ignoring the next level up of subscription services: things like Xbox Live!. All your fees that you might have to pay per game, are wrapped into one, easy fee. If you want to play 10 games online, great. They'll charge a value that means they can cover costs and maintain their servers, while making a profit. And then they add on premiums, like extra content for games: finished Splinter Cell? Pay 10$ and get a whole new set of missions! Don't want to buy NBA 2k4 at 74$? Pay 15$, and get the 2k4 rosters for 2k3!
And the basic online matching and gamertag stuff for every game is included in this fee (except PSO, which has to be the stupidest thing MS has ever done with their Live! service).
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The problem with the Sims online is its fragmentation of metaphor. It only has a "house" and property, but no higher level hierarchial construct such as a street or group space.
If you look at systems like Active Worlds, or There.com, they have a uniform hierarchy, extending from world to "street" to property and finally to user.
EA assumed that the property based metaphor of the Sims would be condusive to multi-user interaction, but the fact of the matter is that it isn't. It spoils the metaphor of group experience when you have commit to a property to facilitate your interaction.
Furthermore, from my experiences play-testing it, it was slow, cumbersome and wasn't enabling of transparent real-timed playability. It stuttered too much and the software itself was unacceptably slow.
This is a copy of a letter I sent to ID and Activision a few months ago. These companies are loosing players in droves and the companies don't even care. Check out the PB forums and see the comments from all the irate players:
What happened to the Quake (2/3) Series?
This is basically an open letter to id Software and how little importance they place in their products. They are loosing players in drovers and their reputation is going down the toilet.
But first a little intro.
I began playing Quake 2 in 95 when some friends at work were having a DM/CTF LAN party. Needles to say I was hooked. I went out and bought the game and downloaded Map after Map. I Became pretty good and eventually became one of the best Q2 CTF players around .
The Q2 CTF MOD was, at the time one of the most innovative MOD's around and pretty much dictated what a Capture the flag Mod should be like. I enjoyed playing on the old YYZ CTF servers and testing new maps from some of the most awesome mappers at the time (Hafhead and gizm0 to name a few). Everyone was into the games, teamplay was amazing and cheaters were nonexistent because Id was on top of various hacks (wallhacking excluded).
Eventually, my scores started to go down and I was ending up at the middle of the pack at the end of rounds. I began spectating people and noticed that people were gibbing enemies from the side and from behind them and discovered the world of bots.
What is a bot?
Some n00bs may get confused by the definition.
There are two types of bots. 1) Used as an AI opponent on various servers to fill empty spaces on servers. These AI players have incredible aim. These bots are good if you want to practice aiming on the run. On Half-Life Servers you can tell bots by their ping. (They all have a ping of 5)
2) Players use the bot components noted in #1 and integrates the auto aim features into their character and play on servers with the auto-aim components. I'm not going to post any of the bot links but they are out there. The people who started using the bots to enhance their own playing experience were mostly pretty stupid. They usually configured their bots to cover auto aiming in a filed of vision of 180 degrees or more around them. What this means is that if a player with a bot is looking forward and they hit fire, the bot will hit anything 180 degrees or more around them without turning. Secondly, they will usually just (if playing a CTF map) shoot and kill people and not work on any of the team objectives.
One more thing to note is one other problem with Quake 2 was that Q2 Servers were susceptible to IP Ping Floods and could take down a given server.
ID Software has a practice of Stopping builds and not releasing any further upgrades or practices. Not long after this, I started to loose interest in this game.
This was about time that the Q3 Arena Demos started to Circulate around. I began playing this game and reading the advanced press from various sources.
When I learned that CTF would loose all the cool components that made Q2 CTF a classic, it was time for me to find a new on-line game to play.
I wasn't drawn to this game very much. Sure there were some cool things about it but I wouldn't buy it ($59.99 was the price I believe) when Q3 Arena came out.
I chose to buy Half-Life and still play it to this day. It's an amazing game and Awesome Mods are still coming out to this day.
In my opinion, if a company can't take what made a given game famous and remove some or all components in a multiplayer game in the next release of a game, the company looses face in the gaming community. No One Lives Forever 2 is a good example of this. No One Lives Forever 2 was initially released without a DM or CTF mod (DM were later added with the first Service Pack after MANY irate customer complaints) the MODs that made NOLF1 a classic (running over people with snowmobiles rock!!!).
Bought Q3 Gold
I was at a Wal-Mart one day and noted Quake 3: Gold for $19.99 and bought it for the heck of it. I was interested in seeing what became of the game and was looking at what it took to map CTF maps. I've been looking into getting into mapping and wanted to do some research into what is needed to create Maps. I soon learned this was a kettle of workms that I probably should not have opened. Install a pain on XP Long story short, Quake 3: Gold has to be installed in a specific manner (it has to be a complete install) on the primary partition, in the default 'suggested' path (XP Pro) (this information was found on the Planequake forums ).
I soon found out that this install was to be the source of some of the issues I've been receiving.
I also use The All Seeing Eye to connect to games and because Q3 wouldn't work in the manner I wanted to install the game in, ASE wouldn't work.
PlanetQuake, Fileplanet other quake related files
Ok, when I played Quake2, planetquake.com was the place to go for all information, patches, maps, etc. I went back to this site and went to the Quake 3 section and began researching what would be needed to update my installation. The planetquake site was slow (I'm on a Cable Modem) to load and took a good 2 minutes to load a page. When I found a given page on maps or mapping, the links that were available were outdated or didn't work. There was no definitive 'manual' on how to find different mods or what programs are needed to map and which files were the most up to date. The links they provided (when they worked...which was about 10% of the time) were anything but helpful. I found four different mapping programs, none of which I've gotten to work correctly yet.
Planetquake has gotten lazy in their old age.
I found the Q3 MODS and patches on fileplanet but due to the new structure of the site (wait in line?!?!?...LAME!!!) I would have had to wait 4-5 days just to download a few files. I searched all over the net for the files I needed on other sites and was able to finish the download in a day.
Once I got some semblance of a Q3 install completed, I connected to a Q3 Server through ASE.
I remembered in the Q3 Install and patch that a program called Punkbuster which is a program that would detect cheaters and bot users. I thought 'cool' Id is doing something about bots and cheaters!'
Punkbuster a nightmare to upgrade
When installing and upgrading Punkbuster to current Standards I was not able to either through the game or using the command line update util. I found out that the problem with the PB (again on XP Pro in Non-Domain mode patched to current standards) is two fold:
1) The Quake Final Patch Release does not install a couple of key files for some reason or another (I found this out on the Planetquake forums ).
2) XP has a default behavior in that all system directories are 'read-only' and cannot be changed no matter what you try (Group Policies, ACLS, command line attributes, removing simple file sharing, etc.). In the case of Quake 3: Gold on XP, the default install dir is 'Program files' directory. Punkbuster needs to convert a couple of HTML files to binary and since the Read-Only Attributes are pushed from the Root Level of the primary partition, PB can't make the conversion.
New Cheats out that render Punkbuster Useless
I'm not going to go in depth about this but there are a couple of serious issues with some cheats out in the wild that PB can't handle at the moment. One issue seems to be addressed. The other is a bot that is undetectable by PB and is being used more and more on Q3 servers.
Players are furious that this issue isn't being addressed (myself included) by ID.
Read the Punkbuster Forums . Just about every single post is a rant about when/how is ID/Punkbuster will be addressing the current hacking issues and how ticked they are on how this issue isn't being addressed. (Side note: as of approx 27.Jan.2003 Punkbuster's forums have been removed and this site is taking the brunt of the PB issues.
I played on some of ThreeWave's CTF Servers (A killer MOD by the way)the other day and played against bot users. Some of these players are so stupid they turned their bot settings to 180 degrees or more and all players on my team wereable to spot this immediately.
Before I wrote this article I played a Vanilla CTF Game on a Q3 Server and there were a couple of players who were killing players in midair with weapons with the littlest fire power or hitting people in midair (from long distances) so they fell and cratered.
Needless to say, the team that I was on were trying and were winning in caps for a while (but not gibs) slowly left the server after many of the players on my team left (we started with 8 and when I left there were 3 versus 7 on the other team).
What's going on ID?!?!?
You're loosing players that used to be hardcore Q2/Q3 players in droves and they probably won't buy any more of your games due to the lack of attention you're giving to the cheaters and hackers.
Also, as a result of my experiences, I have since turned my mapping interests to the Half-Life Mod 'Day of Defeat' and the new James Bond Game '007: NightFire'.
I tell you one thing, I'll never buy another ID product again.
Software is easy to fix, reputations are next to impossible to fix. Get with the program ID!!!
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
I think you just described Television. I think you also described a lot of other industries.
Since the US began to focus increasingly on Quarterly Earnings Per Share (for publicly traded companies), companies have lost interest in creation of new, exciting content/products.
Creating new content is risky. Varying something that worked in the past can be profitable, in the short term. Of course this is at the expense of long term value, since in 5 years, there will be nothing to re-work.
Television has been doing this for the last few years. Reality TV has innundated nearly every channel. Even the once groundbreaking, cool channels like Discovery finally succumbed, and started producing the same kind of "danger, death, destruction". My favorite is Animal Channel, with their version of COPS - ASPCA on Patrol!
Point is, the whole US (and elsewhere) needs to refocus on actually making things for a reason, not just making things for pure money. Of course that means more risk, but it also means more reward.
I could rant about this forever...
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Once I finally played it I found out it was just a clumsy hack of the original game. It feels like a half-ass job.
The graphics, objects (with few exceptions) and same single-lot you occupy are all still there. You just warp around lot-to-lot. It doesn't feel like a neighborhood. There's no scarcity. There's no real economy. The only real appeal is the social aspect. Making friends is the only real way to get ahead. Making money is totally linked to having friends- I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but there's no creativity really, just fill up your lot with the maximum number of visitors and have them all make lawn gnomes together. Wow, fun. You had better like chatting with them or you'll go nuts standing around. The gnomes don't go anywhere either. They disappear and money just drops out of the sky.
The goal of the game is pretty much to create a kick-ass house that people will like hanging out in. Not that it fails at that- but it is still a disappointment after games like Ultima Online that really felt like functioning worlds. Without being able to exchange anything tangible except money and lots (and by that I mean just the lot-sans house) the scope of interesting possibilities is diminished. You could loan money (good luck getting it back) or launch a gambling parlor but thats about it (besides the depressing 'services' that some people offer to 'provide' *shudder*). I wanted to have a shop or a business or something. All you get to do is hang out at someone's house and make pizza for christ's sake. What the hell kind of innovation is a pretty looking chat room?
I admit I don't like fantasy role playing games as a genre quite as much (too much RL AD&D), so I was really excited about this game. Unfortunately, while the original Sims really felt like a Sim, the Sims Online feels very far from it. It's not a world modeled after much in the real world. It's a fun place to hang out for a while but I could never want to stay. I'm still hopeful though. Some other online games took a while to come into their own. I'm skeptical of EA though. They are too economical for their own good. I think the recycled feel of the game is a bad sign. They wanted to cash in quick. Just my opinion.
Still sticking to RL i guess. Damn it all.
2 reasons:
1. No Mac support. My fiancee and I wanted to play at the same time. She has a mac, and I have a peecee. EA for some reason couldn't get its act together for a Mac release.
2. Seemingly troll-hostile. I thumbed through a strategy guide for SIMS online looking for various aspects of the world to see if it could convince me that item "1" could be excused. Anyway, my goal would have been to have a character which was an utter troll--being rude and committing as much random mayhem as possible. Apparently, the game revolves around acquiring resources and making "friends". I wanted to steal resources and make enemies.
So I made the assumption from the no-stealing and generally happy-fun-land essense that there would probably be strong anti-troll measures from an administrative standpoint. "Make someone cry and get your CD key banned". That's bullshit. The SIMS online should have an adult realm where no little kids are online where everything is fair game as far as anti-social behaviors.
If either of the two above criteria were met then I would have bought 1 or 2 copies.
Oh well.
I'll start by saying that I am a player, I had high hopes for it, and I now think the game is in crisis. But not for the reasons other people say...
Players are often seen complaining about a lack of game objects, and rules problems that make it hard to have a correct economy.
Sure. But there IS a small subset of users that have turned the current objects into something more interesting. A few houses have figured out that if you hold "events" like trivia and game shows and such, you keep your visitors around, at their keyboards, entertained. I myself visited such a place one night and it was a blast.
One house I saw went to far as to create a board game with her house. You have a die roll object, you have cones, you have different colored tiles. Voila, a few little things that anyone could have used to create a board game.
One house I saw used the garden objects to create a unique, beautifully-designed house as a tribute to their sim "marriage".
These places say that there are enough objects for players to create their OWN fun by dreaming up scenarios that Maxis never could. And I think that's the whole idea; get enough brains in on it, and they create their own meta-games within the game. The game objects are meaningless, except to provide a kind of infrastructure that the players can use to... entertain themselves, 18 people at a time.
The problem is that it looks like the game is going to run into a catch-22 before it gets to that point. Players "play" the game expecting the fun to come from the game objects; households provide the game objects in with the expectation that this is all they need to do to be successful; and for a long time, all anyone plays with are game objects, and the whole thing gets boring VERY fast. As a lot of subscribers LEAVE without ever realizing that relatively minor point, you get fewer and fewer people trying to develop the game "properly", and a smaller and smaller potential audience.
Nobody is realizing that the overall concept is that house owners should be social engineers, not interior decorators.
As the game progresses, more and more people are figuring out the "secret" but are finding it impossible to get the critical mass of players needed to make their house a success because of the huge dropoff.
There are two things Maxis should do immediately in order to save the game. One: they should give all the players three gratis months. That would keep some of that critical mass of people around while the players develop their own fun. They should think of this time as an investment since the players are going to be doing the R&D for them.
Two: they need to give the players more provisions for communication. The board-game owner (Hula Babe @ Jolly Pines) told me that she'd put a message in the "news" section but that Maxis had not posted it! Players are nudged by the game to visit the "popular" locations but this is not enough information for potential visitors. In-game advertising is useless.
It might be helpful, too, if Maxis was a little more proactive about explaining what's great about these types of properties. It's as if they were hell-bent on making everyone figure it out on their own. When I posted a message telling the rest of the userbase what they had to do, and why they should create meta-games to attract people, one Maxis rep said on my thread "That's exactly the game we've set out to build!" Well damn, why not tell everyone who's bored out of their skull and thinking about dropping the game, only because they haven't figured that out?
"This is a marathon, not a sprint," EA Chairman and CEO Larry Probst told Wall Street analysts during a conference call last week.
"What the subscription level is after six or eight weeks is not important," he said. "It's what happens after 18 months."
And that's very true. Also in the article, people are reminded that Everquest and UO took a loong time, a lot of tinkering by the creators and an enormous and varied user base to get to where they are now; persistent cash cows.
Seriously, EA would be crazy to have honestly expected their millions of subscribers at first. I think this is just a case of a marketing ploy causing a media frenzy that eventually outran its creators.
Yeah, when I first got it, I screwed up about 5 cities in a row, and it sucked hardcore. Then I figured out how to play, and it's pretty sweet once you get going.
As for the things you brought up:
Reconcile edges- do all your terraforming, reconcile the edges and just accept any undesirable areas. Then name the city and start it. If you still have a problem, reconcile the empty neighboring landmasses to your existing city, or just ignore it altogether. Honestly, I've covered about 1/4 of the region, and it hasn't really been a problem. Also, i've noticed that cities with neighbors do better, especially the commericial sector, than stand alone cities.
Power from a neighbor- could be better, I agree. You need empty space next to the edge of the map with the plant, and you need to run the otherwise unneeded powerlines to the edge of the map, then approve a connection. Go to the map where you want to buy the power, and find the power lines. Zone next to them, do not zone on top of them. Go to neighbor deals in the budget panel and make the deal. Yes, it could be better.
Local funding- keep it simple to start- only build a power plant. (and maybe a fire station after 500-1000 people) Spread over the map. You should be able to get to 3000 people or so by just giving them electricity, and nothing else. Build low density residential, med density business, and med density industry, or farms. Farms get you some neat gifts, and make the map pretty, but don't give you any revenue, so keep that in mind.
You'll be raking in the cash if you follow that plan, and then growth will start to slow. At this point, add water to the entire map, and businesses and industry will pick up a little again. Now that you've got the map laid out, start adding academic institutions and health facilities. Position them for maximum coverage, as either of them are only good for residential areas. Then adjust the funding for a 50% buffer over whatever their users are. Keep an eye on the funding; every few years go back and adjust it on all the structures to make sure the capacity isn't overflowed and the workers strike.
Don't reduce the fire fighting budget, because even a small change reduces their radius and competency significantly. Police are okay to take to 80% funding. They won't like it, but they won't strike either.
But if you try and give them all the services right from the start, you'll drive the city into the ground. Add services slowly.
After things get rolling, go over the map and raise everything to high-density, then keep an eye on all funding levels as the city grows.
Changing cities is slower then hell. agreed.
If you get the hang of it, it really is fun to play, and i've had three hours pass on me while I was perfecting a city- and I didn't notice.
my 2 cents anyway.
(Also, introducing individual sims into the city is cute- for about 15 minutes. Then their status updates just clutter all the other news in the ticker box, and you'll want to kick them out.)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I'm anon so nobody will see this probably, but I was all ready to end my boycott of buying EA game's that stemmed from their terrible support in the past.
I went to the Sims site, got out my credit card, and I couldn't find anyplace that said after I paid my $50 that I could download the game. My hope for instant gratification was denied, and I left the site, and started Quake3 again.
It's an online game! After I buy it...let me download it for Christ's sake. EA just doesn't understand the dynamic's of the customers that like The Sims, but I guess that's normal...it is EA we are talking about.
Am I the only one that misread that title?
I could have sworn it said Sim-Dude. Maybe I've seen too many Dell adverts - "Dude! You're getting a Sim!"
I can see the advert campaign now. Annoying Teenage-Sim comes with every Dell purchased! Get yours now!
eh...
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
"The game only scored a 2 stars rating out of a possible 5."
Man, I tell ya, reality sux!
After repeated failures to get two chicks to make out, I gave up on The Sims.
Seriously, what else is the point?
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
Uru, online ages of Myst ( http://uru.ubi.com/ ), is the one Massively Multiplayer Persistent World I am somewhat interested in -- the screenshots show it captures the D'ni feel very well, and they promise it is possible to play it without having to meet all these other people.
That, for me, is why I like singleplayer games much more than multiplayer games (or even singleplayer games with AI comrades) -- I like the singleplayer experience. Still, I'm going to wait for the first independant reviews before buying.
Whoever posted TSO fails because there are no Sims, is exactly right -- I tried the beta, and disliked it. You have to spend hours just levelling up, and I don't go play a game just to sit and wait.
Have the user spend $50 or whatever ont eh game, and give them 6 months of free service.
It's INCREDIBLY annoying to pay for a game, then PAY to play the game!!!
Giving the game away is OK, but it doesn't generate immediate cashflow (quite the reverse, actually), and by NOT charging for the first 6 months, you encourage users to try it out through the teething pains and allow your user base to build up quickly.
Worst case - you end up selling a new game to somebody every 6 months, or until you decide to no longer offer the free initial period (though most users would probably want to keep the characters they've built up, anyway.)
It's the only model that makes sense.
EA is gonna take a bath on this if it doesn't pick up... man... there's a huge dev effort involved and they are counting on it to bring a significant chunk of coin.
I haven't played the released version yet, but it looks like they've forgotten to make a game. The Sims singleplayer was more like a really sophiticated toy than a game (or as Wright himself put it, a Virtual Dollhouse). An online virtual dollhouse isn't much more interesting than an offline one.
The thing that gets me is, I had this whole other idea of what EA was doing with the Sims, and I thought it was terribly clever, and now I realize that it very likely was all in my head.
EA spoke of Internet functions within the Sims. Like, check your email and surf, and whatnot, inside the Sims. Think about that for a second; what an absolutely perfect interface for the AOL-type crowd. You take Sims Online, put it on something locked-down like a console, tout it as the way you access the net. It's a game! Your house is your homepage! People are walking around, chatting, you can go to the little Sim theatre which would download movies to your drive, or go to Sim eBay and actually see who's bidding in live auctions. You know?
That would have been interesting. Sims as interface rather than stunted virtual dollhouse. As it is, it sounds like something that could have been added to the extant Sims with a plug-in.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
You see, I thought The Sims was a great game, but it was the _only_ program (out of a lot that I have used) on my Win2k machine that crashed it. I ended up quitting the game all together because of this. I played a lot of other games on that machine, and still do without any crashing. Pretty weird if you ask me. So, finally.. I would not buy the Sims online game because of this.t /
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Nathan Hart - nhart@SPAM.bonez.BE.net.GONE
http://www.bonez.ne
If I buy one game for 74$, and then gen the equivalent of its sequel for 15$ more (even with a monthly fee), how is that more than two 74$ games?
If I am of the case where I have only 1 game that I play online, then chances are it will cost more over all (because my fixed costs are a very high percentage at that level). However, the more games I play online, the cheaper it is per-game. Economies of scale do apply to this as much as any other cost-curve model.
As I've state before, this is very much a personal choice. That you doesn't agree with it doesn't invalidate it. If you want to, please write up a nice essay on how it all works out. I would enjoy seeing your numbers.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Most of the time I don't. But, once I realized that I had no time for friends, no hope for promotion, and a wife I never saw, I realized that life was easier, more satisfying and realistic...
The main problem with these games are that I must pay 2 twice for the ability to use these games...not that they are bad games
They want to take money from both ends of the horse
$80 bucks just to buy the game, and then they think they can milk me for $10 - $20 / month - !server costs and such! - what a load of bull
I will as a customer pay-to-play, and i will pay for a game...but I will NOT do both
WarCraft, Diablo II...paid for game - good -
Magic online - pay-to-play - good -
SIMs Online / asheron's call / Ultima Online - baddddddd-
- my $.02? - you can't have it...it's all I have!!
Just met to full out snogging in seven minutes (real time). It's easy if you bother to figure out how.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
They could have meet this figures very quickly.
1. Xboxlive is a great system. People who use it, buy just about any live enabled game.
2. Xbox has the disk, processor and storage to use addons or interact with the PC environment very easily.
3. Instant seller. See Item #1 and the fact they could have had MS marketing with them.
Why they're releasing a dumbed down version AFTER the PS/2 i dunno..
and WHY they didn't do Sims ONline for the PS2 is beyond me as well.
See that? Go run off now, little one.
Now there's a concept. Any idea if it's in the works?
It would have the lush 3D world, name recognition, levels, cool weapons, player cooperation (i.e. guilds, gangs), and absolutely no misconceptions. i.e., nobody complains about Player Killers because everyone's a PK by default.
Now accepting applications for GTA Online Police...
please, someone, anyone, create an opensource p2p 3d world browser. I'm sick and tired of being seen solely as a cash cow.
If there is such a thing, can you point to it.
TIA.
2tec
Why the hell does EA continue to produce games for severly off track markets AND cancel the very games that could have been great?
I'm sure a lot of people here remember the lame excuse that they gave for cancelling UO2, which they were kind enough to give at least. When they canned multiplayer Battletech 3025, they gave NO reasons! Battletech 3025 was practically a complete product when it was cancelled.
Ah well. Maybe when their third DOA online game comes in, they will fire the staff at their online games devision and hire some people with brains.
I don't mean to rant, but this is turning into a trend.
Hooking it into World of Warcraft wouldn't have hurt either...
The Sims franchise has been made successful by a demographic of people that want a simple game where they interact with little people under their own control. It's not really a social game. It's more like an advanced game of Solitaire. There are the few that bought it that want the social experience added to the game, but many are content with the "anti-social" aspect of having your own world, with your own people, and no one else to intrude and take the fun out of it.
Games like Team Fortress, Counter Strike, the team variants of UT and Q3, are all social games with an established base of organized groups. The Sims community probably wasn't ready for the jump yet. Given time, they may.
Then again, maybe they should have eased them into it by letting people create small dedicated world servers for their friends to Sim on, building a social structure that way before implementing it as massively multiplayer.
Time will tell.
As the lowest common denominator in graphics rises in power faster than the CPU, good graphics will be a commodity. Chat rooms and message boards will be antique, and people will migrate to more graphical versions of them. I mean, Everquest is nothing more than a bunch of chat rooms with some random weapons and stuff to kill thrown in. You join a party, you're making yet another chat room. You join a guild, another chat room. Sims Online is the same thing. People who play The Sims live out their twisted fantasies in the privacy of their home. The people who would play online just want a place to chat. Two completely different demographics which is why one game's popularity does not correlate to the other's.
And that's the basis of the failure of the online version, and it's inability to interest those people who did like The Sims. It wasn't just the virtual-home-decorating bit of the Sims that appealed to players - it's the interaction with the Sims themselves, the algorithmically-controlled pets whose simple interactions generated narratives and situations, sometimes with a little prodding - in fascinating and amusing ways. The ability to change the environment (decorating, building) and then have those changes in environment change the behavior of the Sims in somewhat, but not completely predictable ways was also compelling - most non-autistic adults are more fascinated by stimuli of partial contingency than with stimuli of full contingency (a cause that creates an effect 70% of the time is more interesting to us than one that creates the same effect 100% of the time - unless, interestingly enough, you're autistic. Social interaction is partially, not fully, contingent.)
But the whole thing becomes far less compelling when it's just a wrapper around chat. The toy element of the game becomes lost; the almost-penetrable Sims-speak becomes typical chit-chat; the veiled logic of Sims-motivations becomes replaced with the quite well known logic of the AOL chat room. It's a step backwords.
You answered his question correctly, but your subject creates confusion.
While you covered very well "why can't The Sims Online be free?", it is not clear there are any reasons to pay for it.
It might also have helped if you mentioned why Battle.net APPEARS to be free, as well as many other multiplayer games: they're just services to connect players so they can set up P2P networks themselves. They don't have to host thousands of players interacting in a couple of servers running a virtual world. There's no way TSO can pay for their infrastructure with box sales (50 bucks pay for eternity?), unless they planned to shut down the game at some point.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
I was going to buy my GF this game for her birthday last week, she loves the sims, but when I went to buy it I read the reviews on amazon and some of the fan sites, and it just put me way off, no way could I buy my GF this crap, but I knew she still wanted it, so I got her to read the amazon reviews, and she said she did not want it anymore, fine by me :).
She bought me sim city 4 as well and I got to say it is a crappy game, its beutifully done but its just to hard, I just want to spend fun running a large city, what I got instead was a game that tries to make you think to much, and don't mention the cheats in that game, type the cheat in for $1000 simolians, it would take you typing the cheat in 100 times in each sim day just to have enough money, although the trainer is pretty cool for getting money. Then it never shipped with its online componant online, or there forum up, insanity. Then the worst thing about it is the ability to import sims from sims online, I mean they probably spent so much time making this feature and I doubt hardly anyone will want to use, and anyone who clciks on it by accidant (which is not that hard) will probably find there computers crash anyway.
I guess its my fault though I expected a game similar to the others but with just updated graphics, not: never played sim city 3000 so don't know if it is similar.
First off, Maxis has to give away the initial program for FREE. Charging $40 PLUS $10 a month is just a rip off. I'm going to have to spend $50 just to try the thing and know it sucks?
:)
Yeah, yeah, that's what you do with other games. But other games don't run on the subscription model. The Sims Online costs me $120/year to play (plus buying the $40 software). Unreal Tournament costed me $50 and I haven't had to pay any more since.
I think online games such as The Sims Online have a future, but the paying up front business model isn't going to fly. Give the software away for free and then just charge per month. It worked for AOL.
And so what if there's "only" 100,000 subscribers? If they stick around for a year, that's $16 million in revenue the first year. Seems good to me.
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
all the people who are addicted to it ain't gonna be around to defend it.
And a Simple one at that:
No Cheat Codes!
People Love to Cheat, and they do it a Lot. Why? They simply don't want to wait for their character to Get Big. They want to Start Big and Stay there.
Besides that, what is the actual Goal of the Sims Online? Big Money character? High Skills character? Is there any reason at All to build your character in any way, shape or form?
After all, if you have a goal, you need a Cheat to get there Before everyone else does, right? Or, if you started after others, you need to "Keep up with the Jonses'" and all they have, or you are the Small Fish.
So, if there is a Goal, there are those who wish to Cheat. If they Can't cheat, they get bored (or just can't be bothered), and walk away. After all, they can play their Sims Unleashed, and get all the money they ever wanted, and live in a HUGE mansion with topless maids, and 5 assorted spouses and work as the Mayor of the City. All with a few stupid cheat codes, and a bit of building patience to make the Perfect House.
What do you get online?
None of the opportunities that people have ben getting out of their isolated version.
Why haven't they made a version that allows people to play in a multi-player/LAN environment? Something that allows two (or more) people to just share their local game.
Might be an idea.
The problem with TheSims as a online game: no deapth no interest nata. T
At first your comment made no sense to me, but as I thought a bit realized it would be cool to bust into the middle of a SIMs pool party with an Orc Blademaster and just go to TOWN.
"All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - George Orwell
I reada great article a couple years ago about a _very_ early attempt by Lucasfilm at making a MMORPG.
The client machine was a Commodore 64 (!), and the game never got past beta, but it seems like they learned a lot of things about what works and what doesn't. It also sounds like they were a lot more adventerous (athough usually peacful, the game included weapons) and actively creative (planned events and adventures).
Anyways, here's the article - although the site is slow it's an interesting read for those interested in virtual communities and such. It includes quite a bit of both technical detail and virtual social theory.
Be sure to check out the amusing "dungeon of death" story, the mixup that followed, and the good and bad solutions they used. Great history stuff that the Sims Online folks most certainly could have benefitted from.
Cheers
The Sims is a stupid premise anyways... Worlds of Warcraft anyone? ;P
The Sims Online does still manage to hold the title for best way to meet lesbians via a computer game.
First - overall retail sales were not as expected for December. As far as I can tell; there was no "must have" or "hot" toy this season. There are a number of factors that contributed to this and I'll leave them to your own knowledge of current events and the economy.
Second, note the person that said "my wife plays it nonstop". Yes, I bet any wife whose husband lets her pay monthly money for a game is playing it instead of playing Medievia; JediMUD, etc. - some of those bored housewives had to move from free text games to an online game at some point. BUT IT IS ONLY THE WIVES PLAYING IT, and there are few in the online-game-playing demographic that can likely afford it. That 10 bucks usually pays for their husband's chew.
Third, I very much doubt the community and roleplaying aspects touted in many magazines (Wired, for example) really appealed to anyone. I have played many online games - several MUDS, a few multiplayer combats like SW:GB, HomeWorld (I still enjoy HW), WarCraft, etc. and Earth and Beyond and Dark Age of Camelot - and the "community" is not there unless you are younger and have time to participate in it. Battle games are a brief interaction; and I don't see the roleplaying and interaction in the graphic MMORPGs that I expected. In fact, Earth and Beyond strikes me as a game that requires little interaction with the environment at all. If a game in unpopular or becomes unpopular - or if, for example, the updates and the content don't get added for the higher-level players or the lower-level ones feel left out -- there is little incentive to continue playing thus there is little interaction. I also see far less interaction in MUDs I play regularly than I have before; thus I play them less regularly even though they are free. A lot of those players know each other or know of each other and have real life communications and even relationships outside of the games and like any soap opera [or message board filled with precocious princesses seeking romance where they should not like bianca.com]; the relationships change and even become nonexistent. This trend has been experienced by potential customers of this game and they don't intend to repeat it.
Third, I see two categories of people playing MMORPGs - the hardcore, who can spend 20-30 hours a week playing. Whether they are die-hard gamers [and they are busy levelling not talking with other players] or do little else but play is a moot point. Then you have the casual player; and forming online relationships or investing a considerable amount of time in a game are completely inconceivable. I, personally, have shut down my subscriptions to games because if i cannot but play them once every few weeks - even if it is for four or more hours at that time - I feel I'm wasting my money paying a monthly fee for a game that in some cases I don't enjoy because I may be getting nowhere with such little time to invest in the game. Even if you do advance quickly; if you don't feel you are getting your money's worth regardless of the reason you will quit playing.
Finally -- Star Wars Galaxies comes out very soon and ALL of the gamers I know have not bought a game since November and have started shutting down their online game accounts or reducing their participation in anticipation of this game. Watch EverQuest start seeing a drop in accounts; watch other online games with intent for a large market start to falter or even fail. Even those interested in Star Wars Galaxies are skeptical about whether they should play or not because they will not be able to invest time in it (see number three).
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
DOS Air:
All the passengers go out onto the runway, grab hold of the plane, push it
until it gets in the air, hop on, jump off when it hits the ground again.
Then they grab the plane again, push it back into the air, hop on, et
cetera.
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