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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."
Maybe they should have simulated the release of the game in The Sims to see what the outcome would have been. :-)
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
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.
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
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....
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!
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.
How do you kill people and steal all their stuff in the Sims online again?
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
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
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
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...
First, I don't have hours and hours to play games in the first place. I've got homework to do, college to pay for, and then afterwards a little time to unwind. Even at say $10 a month for a single online subscription game I might play at most a few hours of it a month. That's about all the more I get to play most games now. The hourly cost isn't that high, but the total cost over a year is obscene, $170 including purchase cost for maybe 36 hours of gameplay. Sorry.
Second, I can find an abundance of quality entertainment, online multiplayer even, other places for free, or included in the purchase cost of the game. Battle.Net seems to be working out alright, though I'm not a huge fan of playing with some of the jerks on there. I'd rather set up a LAN and play that way, or prearrange an Battle.Net room. Otherwise there are tons of MUDs and other free games out there as well. Those have kept me entertained for longer periods of time than some games I've purchased.
Maybe when I'm making more money than I currently am trapped in college I'll feel differently. Right now, however, I don't even toss subscription games a second look. For some reason I don't think I'm going to change my mind lightly either.
If not now, when?
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.
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.
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.
I dunno. A lot of people pay $23 per month just to use AOL's chat rooms, and $5-$15 fees for online dating services. If Sims Online gets big enough for a lot of people to forge relationships, they will maintain a subsistance subscription level. The "boring" skill system would be less boring if you're chatting while doing it (think online spelling bee). And it might entice people to get an alternate internet provider...$10 for juno and then $10 for Sims Online is still less than $23 for AOL. EA should forge a relationship with one of the sub-$20 providers and offer a "sims internet service," the Sims being a more successful franchise than even AOL last year.
It seems like Sims Online's biggest mistake isn't the online engine so much as the speed. You can build a sim up really quickly in the original game, getting a two or more promotions in an hour and plenty of dough. If I had to take a few days to do the same...well, I wouldn't.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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
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.
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
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
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