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EA-Land (The Sims Online) Joins The Deadpool
EA-Land, the service previously known as The Sims Online will shut August 1, despite a much hyped revamp announced late February.
The Sims Online was generally regarded to be a failure for EA, with the company unable to turn the success of The Sims franchise into an online hit. The service wasn’t helped by a complete lack of customizable features (outside of the usual Sims customization tools) and EA charged for access.
The new (but now never to be launched) EA-Land was to be EA’s second shot of success, and promised Second Life style customization and land ownership, with a free client and free to use service.
EA didn’t provide a full explanation for the shutdown, only saying that “The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end, and now we will be focusing on new ideas and other innovative concepts in the games arena.”
Paying users of the Sims Online are being offered a $15 gift voucher and three months premium access to Pogo.
The Sims Online/ EA-Land joins the TechCrunch Deadpool.
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HiPiHi Opens Its Doors To The Public
HiPiHi, China’s answer to Second Life has opened its doors to the public with a beta test that includes free features. We first wrote about HiPiHi in August 2007 when the company called for the establishment of virtual world standards and interoperability.
German’s are famed for their ability to clone sites, but the Chinese aren’t far behind; HiPiHi looks and feels like Second Life, at least in the demonstration video (in Mandarin above). HiPiHi is available in Chinese and English, and name registration supports both character sets. The service is free to use and register, and like Second Life users can rent land and create their own items.
According to the Second Life Herald, HiPiHi is working with Intel and IBM towards building the platform architecture so that it “is more open, highly scalable and truly inter-operable, in order to lay the groundwork for the mainstreaming of virtual worlds.”
PC only, and although the service is available in English, the download page isn’t.
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EA Turns The Sims Online Into Free EA-Land, Second Life Competitor
EA is relaunching The Sims Online as a free service with a new name and new features, including UGC, commerce and land ownership.
EA-Land is the new, free Sims Online (TSO). The 12 different cities from TSO are being moved to EA-Land and the game area is being expanded to be “100 times bigger than the previous size of any city.” Existing TSO users will be able to purchase land in EA-Land before the new (reincarnated) world is open to the public with paying TSO users becoming “EA-Land subscribers” in a similar fashion to the way Linden Lab charges for land in Second Life.
Users of EA-Land will have the ability to upload custom content and (more importantly) buy these customizations from other players. Sounding a lot like Second Life? It gets better:
We heard from the community that the economy was broken in TSO. That was true, too many users were billionaires, and the goal of the game was mostly about extracting money from Maxis. I can now say with satisfaction that we have fixed the economy on EA-Land. This took many features, from establishing a real estate market, where users can easily buy or sell lots to one another, and a dynamic object pricing market where the prices of objects purchased from maxis is based on supply and demand, enabling stores and entrepreneurs to earn a living. We also enabled users to buy simoleans directly from Maxis. While there is no need for users to do so in the game (we give subscribers simoleans every week), it can help new users build their dream house faster with a simple paypal transaction secured by us.
There is one significant difference though to Second Life: EA-Land won’t become the wild west as EA will be “approving all of the content [so] this user content is safe to be viewed by everyone.”
Second Life fans will point out that TSO/ EA-Land has a lot of difference to Second Life in terms of capabilities, and that is true. And yet really basic 2D service such as Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel have millions of users compared to Second Life’s 100-200,000 regular users over a 60 day period. As much as I hate the name, free is a great selling point and EA-Land has the potential of catering to users who want something more from their online words than the basic services, without the hassles of Second Life.
(in part via GigaOm)
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Virtual Banking Banned in Second Life
Linden Lab has announced that virtual banking within Second Life is to be banned effective January 22 after receiving multiple complaints by Second Life residents scammed by bank operators.
Banking and associated services have become popular in Second Life over the last two years, with many offering ponzi style interest schemes that usually sounded too good to be true. Ginko Financial was the best known failure amongst Second Life banks, owing 200 million Linden ($750,000) to depositors when it declared itself insolvent in August 2007.
In a post on the Second Life blog, Ken Linden said that as well as not being able to provide protection to Second Life users with these banks running, their legality under law is also questionable. The decision is unlikely to affect virtual stock exchanges but may affect groups such as Second Life credit card provider Metacard, who also previously offered bank services as well.
Second Life banks are experiencing a run on their funds as customers seek to get their money before the ban comes in place. Companies such as JT Financial have been inundated by customers wanting to know what is going on. Screen shot of the JT Financial crisis meeting below.
Banking joins bestiality and gambling on the banned in Second Life list.
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