Premium DLC didn't start with The Sims 2 Store

Now Playing. "A Day in Suburbia" (Outtake from the Myshuno! recording session) by T1na Badgraph1csghost.

I talk a lot about how great The Sims was for the old web; how it unlocked the fashion designer, architect, and interior decorator in all of us so we made websites about it. Well, it also unlocked a whole new generation of corporate-minded shills. I don't remember which site started this, but pretty soon after the first expansion pack came out, people started to demand payment before you could download anything. Sites that used to have stuff available for free suddenly started intercepting download requests and redirecting everyone to pages where you would put in your credit card number or PayPal creds.

I think it was KillerSims, but it may have been The Sims Resource, I can't quite recall. If I were given to conspiracy theory, I might think that EA saw all this happening and went, "Heyyyy, wait a minute!" But, The Sims was happening at the same time the dot-com bubble was bursting, giving rise to our modern concept of the Side-Hustle. The fact is that it stopped being a hobby very quickly and became half the internet's side-hustle; the bits of the internet that weren't doing amateur porn were churning out content for The Sims and charging for it. Often it was extremely slapdash, as though everyone was trying to jump on the train at the same time. People could make object recolours fairly simply in Photoshop by selecting the yellow area, inverting the selection, and then performing a colour variation; and then slap it onto their server like pre-formed patties onto a park grill. It got pretty contentious there for a while, with certain of the more dishonest websites downloading stuff from the Exchange, claiming it as their own, and reselling it at a mark-up.

Fortunately, after a while, people started to get wise to the scam and made new websites and new stuff that was free again, but the damage was done. Once The Sims hit its stride, around about Hot Date, I stopped going to Sims fansites. I even quit going to the Exchange for the most part. I'm sorry to report that the Premium DLC model is still being used by Sims modders, locking stuff behind clearly-defined paywalls. Even though The Sims Resource's tendency has improved marginally, they've translated paywalls into monthly subscriptions to a "Pro" version of their website along with the rest of the internet. "Tired of ads? Pay us money! Tired of banners asking you if you're tired of ads? Pay us money!" There's "needing money to maintain a large website" and then there's "annoying morass of adverts and popups designed to fool you into clicking a sponsored link instead of a legitimate download button". This is why I didn't include Around The Sims or The Sims Resource in the Sims 4 Starter Kit, because, even though Mod The Sims still serves you adverts, they're real about it. They don't try and goad you into buying a temporary "Pro" version of their website or force you to sit through a mandatory 60-second delay before a download option is revealed.

That's the thing I always need to remind myself about The Sims. Yes, it was a fun thing for the first year or so, but it all fell into the shit-pit promptly in April of 2001.

--3 May 2024--

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