So how many here still play (and enjoy) The Sims Social? It’s not going away anytime soon – in fact, they have plans to expand and bring more content to it according to this interview conducted via Girl Gamers and Erik Reynolds of PlayFish. I gave up the game because of the whole issue with using real money to get anywhere, and the fact that you have to keep pestering your friends for progress – much like all facebook games…
GGUK: Will we be seeing real-life brands in The Sims Social?
ER: We are already doing this in The Sims Social right now; we’ve already got a few brands already integrated into the game. In North America specifically we’ve got a number of brands that have global elements and really it will be on a territory by territory basis, whats really meaningful to the Sims fan in that territory. Right now, we’ve got Dunkin’ Donuts, we’ve got Toyota, Dr Pepper. We really listen to the Sims community and we are going to be open to, what are the brands that they interact with the most, what are the brands that want to reach our audience and the beauty of the Sims games is that, these are games where you play with life. So real brands don’t break that fourth wall and we can actually enhance the experience by bringing in real brands and giving them very light gameplay hooks that don’t break the experience, that don’t dilute what the Sims fan is really looking for.
GGUK: How much inspiration for The Sims Social was taken from The Sims Online?
ER: The Sims Online provided us with a lot of key learnings for what a Sims fan is looking for in a game and you’ve got to remember at that time the Sims Online was really leading the way in MMO. It was at a time when MMO wasn’t completely understandable and accessible to gamers worldwide. It was a niche of a niche and now it’s become an extremely large niche. The Sims Studio really took those learning’s and passed those along to Playfish and they came together to bring the world’s biggest PC franchise to the world’s largest social platform. We saw a huge overlap from there in the beginning and the interesting thing about this Sims Social is that there are natural contact points for really emphasising those social elements of FaceBook. We feel we are doing it differently than what’s currently available. I think we are putting the social back into social gaming.
I enjoyed it at first, but I only ever had 3 friends who played, and now one of them has stopped playing. So I haven’t been able to complete more than a few quests, and I can’t even add any new rooms to my house anymore (not to mention I wasted about $6000 in-game money trying to add new rooms, not knowing the friend requirement needed to build them, so I had to delete them right away once I saw the friend requirement was more than the number of friends I had). Also, all my skill levels are at the point where everything I need to unlock new things I need to have sent to me by friends… and it’s just become too frustrating to play, and a bit depressing that I can’t advance any further just because I don’t have enough active friends. Stupid social games. :/
I tried it for one day, with a friend. No temptation whatsoever to go back. I think that whole gameplay model is downright abusive of the player. I am totally mystified why it’s successful :/