On September 17, Electronic Arts will finally release The Sims 2. I’m going to buy a new desktop later this month specifically so I can run it when it comes out (my laptop doesn’t have the requisite 3D hardware needed to run the game).
One of the things that made The Sims such a great game was all of the custom content that users made and uploaded to fan sites. Getting the custom content to work could be tricky in some cases, though, so Maxis really overhauled the in-game method for downloading and managing custom content. EA itself will host a Showcase area where users can upload and download custom content for the game. In the opinion of some custom content creators, however, Maxis and EA have gone too far and made it too easy to get content in and out of The Sims 2.
This thread at The Sims Resource is one long rant by those who want to create custom content for the game that boils down to this — Maxis didn’t build any sort of digital rights management into the game, so anybody can steal or take credit for someone else’s creation rather easily. Just as with any other moddable game out there.
The funniest examples are those who are upset at the idea that people might take credit for their rip-off of copyrighted characters. One person, for examples, offers up the horrific example of someone stealing a popular Gollum character skin and falsely taking credit for it. The poster downloads the skin and uploads it to show just how easy such “theft” is using EA’s Showcase (and no one in the thread mentions the obvious hypocrisy in that particular worry.)
Others propose the sort of bizarre DRM schemes that only the RIAA could love. So, for example, a couple of people float copyright flag suggestions where each uploaded file would have a flag that creators could set that would allow the creation to be downloaded but not uploaded again. Right, because the same folks who will have cracks for the game CD the day The Sims 2 is released will find writing utilities to reset those flags completely beyond their ability. Such a system would be hacked and cracked by the end of the first week of release.
There are a number of variants and alternatives to that system that all involve programs checking and storing copyright metadata, all of which would be hacked ridiculously quickly and simply interfere with legitimate uses of the program.
The change has real world financial consequences. One of the reasons that there is so much carping is that a number of fan sites planned to pay for bandwidth charges, etc., by charging visitors for access to exclusive content for The Sims 2 that could only be downloaded from that site. There are a number of excellent sites like Sim Freaks that use this model for The Sims.
But with the Showcase area and now DRM for custom content files, someone could simply download files from sites like that and instantaneously upload them to the EA Showcase area. I doubt EA is going to want to do any serious policing of the Showcase and, if it is smart, will included an EULA that basically grants the company at the least nonexclusive rights to all custom content to avoid having to worry about this.
Of course the EULA for the building tools is quite clear that they are offered for producing non-commercial mods, so these sites don’t really have much to complain about. Frankly, though, don’t think they have much to worry about. If I’m serious enough about the game to be willing to track down sites like Sim Freaks, I’m going to be willing to pay to have all of that excellent content in one place — there is, after all, a huge opportunity cost to wading through the large numbers of repetitive and uninteresting materials that will inevitably be posted by newbies and others in EA’s official Showcase area.
One thing that the thread didn’t mention but is closely related is how EA is going to react to copyright-infringing materials being posted on the Showcase. I have on my hard drive, for example, dozens of skins for The Sims that are various characters from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Want a Season 3 Willow and a Season 7 Anya? I’ve got ’em. Is EA going to look the other way at posting those sorts of skins and custom content (especially since some companies, especially comic book companies, have of late been cracking down on unlicensed custom content for computer games, apparently out of ridiculous fears that it dilutes the value of their licensed games). With 17,000+ Sims uploaded to the Showcase area a full two months before the game’s scheduled release, they’re going to have a nice headache on their hands with these sorts of issues.