GamesBeat published a general interview with the general manager of The Sims Label, Tim LeTourneau. It’s the usual basic interview, nothing really stands out except for the fact that The Sims series has reached 125 million copies sold. A question during the interview did stick out to me about making the games open source…I’d love for them to release the original Sims game as open source – it’s pretty much dead, so it would bring new life to it. However he pretty much shot that chance down stating:
We have never gone that far. We still want to be able to control the experience for the users, to keep it consistent. We have been nervous about making it too open. The world of The Sims is precious to individual players. They trust the content we get from us. We go to great lengths to protect their content that they have created. We would never want that undermined by malicious players. It’s a tightrope that we walk.
I do find it odd how they want to protect us from ‘malicious players’ but for the most part, the patches that come from EA causes more harm then custom content does….so yeah…
I can’t see them releasing The Sims as open source as they still use a lot of the techniques and code in their latest versions. However, i would like to see them releasing The Sims 1 and it’s expansions pack as a Freeware download. They aren’t likely to make anymore money on it and in this the Anniversary year it would be seen as a fantastic gesture of good will to the die hard fans. Plus many people who are unsure of The Sims as a game may try the freeware Sims 1, and get hooked into the Franchise.