EA's Sims Online Is A Flop And Other MMORPG Musings

Ignorant Aardvark writes "Wired has an article out about the upcoming Multiplayer Games Summit at E3. Some of the interesting parts of the article: 'The Sims Online has sold 125,000 copies retail, has been discounted from $50 to as low as $20 on Amazon and has 97,000 active subscribers.' Compare that to EverQuest, with 470,000 subscriptions. Investment analyst Michael Pachter says of TSO: 'They took a very popular franchise that's a single-player game in which you play with dolls, and when you play with dolls, they follow rules and behave in predictable ways. With The Sims Online, you're playing real people, and real people don't behave the way you'd expect them to.' And here's the gem of the article: 'Consumers might not be responding well to paying individual subscriptions for single online games, but might react better to cable TV-like pricing in which they get access to a number of offerings for a flat fee.' Does anyone see this pricing system as being more successful?"

Comments

Dialog with the Sims Online

[cgenman]

Sims Online: Hi! I have a great licence! I'm a game you can play while going to get a sandwich. My creator appologized for me, but we promise I will get better! Wanna play? I'm only $10 per month.

Consumer: Umm... So I sit around and click on a book for six hours until my character gets reading +3? No thanks.

Sims Online: No really, I will be a great game someday. You will be able to pick your character's color while clicking. Yay! Doesn't that sound like fun? Hey, where are you going? Awww....

Analyist 1: Hmm. The Sims Online is a terrible failure, only raking in one million dollars per month. I wonder what it could be?

Analyist 2: They have a great licence. They're positioned well to get the elusive 20 to 40 year old female market. We spent 20% of the budget on advertising. Yet we aren't seeing the return expected.

Consumer [knocking on window]: Dude, your game sucks!

Analyist 1: The market must not be ready to support online gaming. Everquest, Asheron's Call, and all of Korea must be a fluke.

Consumer [knocking on window]: Dude, take this crappy thing back!

Analyist 2: People just aren't prepared to pay monthly fees. Perhaps if we abandoned the service-provider model and moved to a cable TV model we could see synergies dwarfing those of AOL Time Warner.

Analyist 1: A 50 dollar a month fee to play a catalog of online titles... That just might fly. We just need to hire a college intern to program an emulator in Java and we will have all of the content we need!

Consumer: Dude, this Sims thing is worse than Clippy. Get it off me!

Sims Online: No, just give me one more chance! I swear I can change!

Analyist 1: Yes, the industry is headed for dark times indeed. How's your golden parachute looking?

Why Sims Failed

[Kethinov]

I was a pretty regular UO player for a while, also an EA game, and if there's one thing I can remember more than anything it's how much we all made fun of The SIMS players. Just about everyone who played that game was considered an instant pansy and no one wanted to associate with them. It was almost like that one kid in every high school who comes to school dressed like a 50s child.

There's nothing wrong with dressing like that, or playing the Sims online. But the game just has this bad blood; a bad reputation. Kinda like the bad reputation Everquest seems to be getting with all these anti MMORPG articles popping up.