INTRODUCTIONwertwre

In 2001, Will Wright gave a talk regarding his work on Simcity and The Sims. Regarding The Sims, Will Wright had a very specific vision of what the online community would look like. Very few games, other than Petz, had a content creation community as vast as what was planned for The Sims. Moreover, unlike other games that would come afterwards, The Sims’ community was self-maintaining for the most part. While yes there were official tools and websites that would act as hubs, the community worked without Maxis or EA maintaining online support for their product. 

This model worked extremely well. Probably better than they’d ever imagined it would and to this day even the oldest entries of the game still have active content creators. The Sims 2, specifically, has a community so active that it was one of the most discussed games on Tumblr in 2023. However, what Will Wright and others at the company likely didn’t fully comprehend was what the economy of the game would look like. While many, MANY post mortems have been written regarding economies in online games, The Sims is different since there is no in-game currency for player made content. Instead, content is made by players and the way that creators decide to share that content is entirely up to them. 

The way that Wright explained his vision for this system was by comparing it to an ecological pyramid. This system was self sustaining, you had
 

This is basically the makeup of the community to this day. This didn’t mean that Maxis wasn’t involved in the community at all in the beginning. They made some of the tools for the game themselves and would continue to for later games with exceptions (remember this for later). This would get the ball rolling for the community and provide content for download on day one. On release, the game would already have content ready-to-use made by players who were directly in contact with Maxis during the creation of The Sims.

But why? Why does any of this matter? Well, as The Sims community changed and quickly outpaced what Maxis expected, and even wanted, from the community money quickly became involved which changed the scope of the community. On top of that, cultural and technological changes changed the landscape.

Moreover, I personally, was the original founder of a digital piracy ring that stole thousands of dollars worth of digital doll clothes called Dollhouse Mafia and I have an interesting story to tell regarding EA, the community they lost control of, and the underground economy that they inadvertently created through incompetence.