As has been reported in several places starting with the EA-Land blog (to which the EA-Land site now points), EA will be shutting down EA-Land in August. EA-Land was the do-over of The Sims Online, which at one time in its heady pre-release days was the presumptive heir to the "first million user virtual world" crown. A virtual world/game from EA and built using the biggest, most successful and accessible game IP ever?
What could possibly go wrong?
This is a question that has been asked innumerable times in view of TSO's lack of commercial success, and which deserves some real consideration. The inability of TSO to attract even 100,000 users gave many virtual world watchers significant pause -- could this whole thing be just a big fad after all? We've since discovered that the market for virtual worlds is orders of magnitude larger than TSO's numbers might indicate, but still this is a nagging question. The Sims Online seemed to have everything going for it: the best possible IP, the biggest publisher, and a huge team. So what happened? Why didn't this game crest a million happy, Simmy users as new players flooded online?
There are a lot of thoughts and a lot of theories: Was it the removal of The Sims' charming internal motivations, leaving them as only empty avatars? Was it the lack of significant gameplay (aside from making gnomes, jam, and pizza)? Was the game in effect too social and in the wrong ways? Was it even the fact that EA has seen huge success with single-player console and PC games, but was ill-equipped to take on the design of an MMO? Or something else? I have my thoughts and opinions (full disclosure: I was on the TSO team early in its life, and my opinions are informed by that time), but I'm interested to hear what others who have followed it and played it think.
One last thing for now: it's important to note, as Luc Barthelet said in his 'thank you' post on the
EA-Land blog, that "virtual worlds are still in their infancy." This is
certainly true, and we should expect some big failures -- but hopefully
ones that, as Clay Shirky recently wrote, will fail informatively. We've seen a number of failures in MMOs (including several from EA), despite the overall large number of commercial successes, and will no doubt see more as time goes on.
What can we learn from the redo of TSO and now the shuttering of EA-Land, and what does this tell us about the future (in terms of design, production, and commercial success) of MMOs and virtual worlds?
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