The Sims Online - EA-Land

EA-Land

In March 2007, an Electronic Arts employee Luc Barthelet, who served as General Manager of Maxis during the development of The Sims, stopped by the official forums after years of ignoring the game. Luc had left the Sims Online production team after the game went live and hadn't contributed to the game environment until March 2007. After returning to development of The Sims Online, he assembled a team of seventeen people to push significant updates to the game under a project titled "TSO-E".

A major update to the game was user custom content. The TSO-E developers were interested in any user-submitted ideas on how they could maintain a stable economy to negate the gains players made illegitimately through exploits. Custom objects were enabled within TSO in late 2007, allowing players to upload .bmp and .jpg images as well as .iff files. Furniture could be created and uploaded in the form of single-tiled chairs, sculptures, and decorations and multi-tiled tables.

Seeing as this was not enough, the TSO-E developers combined the game's cities together into two similar cities, re-branded the game as EA-Land, and wiped all player data. The Test Center 3 city was created freely accessible in hopes of expanding the game's userbase, and in-game ATMs were added, which could accept real money for Simoleans, in hopes of generating revenue. The system in which players could purchase properties and submit custom content was compared to Second Life.