There've been rumours bubbling around this for weeks now, but EA has officially launched its new virtual world. It's called EA-Land, and is based on the existing architecture for The Sims Online. The world is free to access and web-based, and allows users to upload their own content.
EA’s Luc Barthelet has explained the new world to users in a blog posting, with an invitation to existing Sims Online players to come back and reactivate their accounts, which if they do it before March, will ensure they get all their account-based privileges back.
EA-Land will now host all the existing Sims Online cities, with beefed-up limits on how many simultaneous visitors each house can hold. Users won’t be limited to having one Sim character per city in the new version either.
One of the key new features is the ability for users to create and upload their own content. “Players have already uploaded several thousands pieces of custom content,” says Barthelet. “I suspect that by some time this year, all of the content of the game will have been replaced many times over by custom content… Because we are approving all of the content, this user content is safe to be viewed by everyone! We are working with the main user web sites that have been providing custom content to the Sims users for years to make sure that their content will be made available in the game.”
The economy has also been revamped, including setting up a real-estate market for users to sell their land to one another, and a dynamic object-pricing market where items get more expensive or cheap depending on demand. According to Barthelet’s posting, the aim was also to fix the problems around too many virtual-billionaires in The Sims Online, where “the goal of the game was mostly about extracting money from Maxis”.
Most interestingly, EA has made EA-Land an open environment, providing widgets for Google, Yahoo and even iPhone for users to be able to track their friends’ online status. There’s also an Avatar Book application on Facebook which links in to the virtual world.
By making EA-Land free and web-based, EA is clearly after a casual audience, possibly taking on Habbo Hotel directly. I guess the EA branding is about tying in the company’s own games - whether casual (it’ll be interesting to see how Pogo.com links in with EA-Land) or console.
EA-Land website
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