Well the Sims 3 has been delayed from February 20 to June 2. The press release does not say why, but it is my guess that it is as much about no one is buying games as it is it not being ready, not to mention them laying off a bunch of people. I hope they use this extra time to do some decent testing.
Isn’t the game industry as a whole doing pretty good?
Nevermind, it looks like it is raking in the money, but it’s not an even situtation with only a few players cashing in.
It seems weird that such a huge franchise has 1. seen very little in the way of advertisement, unless I’ve missed it, though I’m pretty tuned in to all things PC gaming, 2. Have been having issues with blog posts and news posts appearing/disappearing on the official website, and 3. that they would wait until only a few weeks before release to announce a 4 MONTH delay.
Well, I’m with you in hoping that this just gives them more time to polish up the game. The review from some of the people involved in the whole content creation thing was both good and bad. Here’s hoping they fix some of that bad.
There is a theory that the game has more bugs than they realized. They recently had a big “creators’ camp” for publicity purposes. Some of the well known custom content creators got to play the game and write about it on their sites.
Several of them commented that the game was very buggy. The feeling is that EA thought the game was ready and was surprised by all these new bugs turning up. Soon after this, online vendors started replacing the Feb 20 date with TBA.
Another theory is that they’re worried about the looming SecuRom lawsuit. By pushing the game back, they have time to decide whether to include SecuRom with it.
That is great news about the creator’s camp bugs. We know from each of the expansion pack bugs that they have trouble finding bugs before the release. It seems like they have been having developers do the testing and not proper testers. The four month push back is a decent time frame to do a bug fix cycle. It sounds like they might have found a bug the size of the jump bug in Sims 2.
I don’t have any inside knowledge to back this up, but EA’s PR machine definitely put The Sims 3 on the backburner in 2008 to focus on Spore. I think this is because…
- No one at EA realized that Spore would be pushed back to September until right before the announcement
- There was some belief that The Sims name would sell itself
- The Sims is a bit of a redheaded stepchild in the video game journalism committee. Basically, admitting to playing The Sims is like that old joke about male masturbation, 90% do it and 10% lie about it (although I’d change the percentages to 60/40).
There was a big article I read yesterday that said that EA is pushing back the release of several games, not related to the games themselves having issues, but simply related to the fact that the industry itself is seeing a slowdown, inventories at game stores are too high, so they are holding back on releases until inventory in stores has been drawn down. The new release date puts the game into FY 2010 for EA, apparently.
On the upside, that means this will be a great birthday present!
former EA tester (Sims 2, among others) chiming in here.
It should also be mentioned that Sims games are notoriously difficult to test as there’s just so much you can do. Now add in the lay-offs and you have a depleted tester force, and over-worked dev team (EA’s dev teams are ALWAYS overworked… so are their tester teams for that matter. I used to work 85-96 hours a week pretty regularly) and you have a lot of people who are finding bugs that aren’t being fixed cause the devs are too busy, or simply not finding all the bugs cause there aren’t enough people on the test team.
Anyway, whether that has anything to do with the delay, or if it’s quite simply due to slowing sales and stores wanting to deplete some of their back stocks, I dunno. Just figured I’d chime in
Is the game going to have DRM? I know some folks that play the Sims 2 that said they won’t purchase 3 if it involves DRM…could that possibly be a minor holdup for the game?
as Postariti mentioned above, it’s a possible reason, what with the SecuRom lawsuit looming overhead.
That said, the game will, in all likeliness, have some form of DRM. Whether or not it’s as bullshit as SecuRom remains to be seen, though I’d like to think EA learned a lesson with the consumer bitch-slap that was Spore and its accompanying backlash.