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Technology

We all need to stop buying the Madden video game

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EA Sports lost a whole lot of Madden 23 files over the holiday.
Image: Getty Images

Sports video games are notoriously awful. Rarely anything about them changes from year to year aside from roster updates and an occasional graphics overhaul. Gameplay stays relatively the same, thus the fun stays about the same as well. Actually, the fun may be decreasing as several sports franchises turn their attention to money-making modes like Ultimate Team or Diamond Dynasty, neglecting the modes that give the games a public appeal. EA Sports’ Madden NFL game is arguably the worst offender.

I don’t have to say how low the Madden franchise has fallen in recent years. Search YouTube and you’ll find a library of creators with in-depth videos about the unprecedented decline in quality of Madden games. You could probably do that with any sports franchise — FIFA, NBA 2K, MLB: The Show. Even a series as beloved as the NHL series has seen a considerable decline in consumer ratings in recent years. However, with the popularity of football in America, Madden has more or less become the poster child for sports video games’ mediocrity, and this past week, Madden may have made their biggest blunder ever, a real serious whoopsy-daisy, if you will.

Madden’s Christmas blunder

If you’re not up-to-date with Madden news, I don’t blame you. I haven’t played Madden 23 since like Week 4 of the current NFL season, and I only bought it because I’m a weak-willed individual who succumbs to peer pressure way too quickly. However, I hope you’ll still get upset when you realize what Madden did to its user base.

It all started on December 26, when Madden gave its users a faulty franchise mode for Christmas. I guess they were all on EA’s naughty list for not stealing other people’s credit cards to buy more MUT packs, I’m not sure. Regardless, for some unknown reason, people were having trouble logging into Connected Franchise Mode, which is the only mode some people, including myself, play nowadays on Madden. It’s a way to conduct seasons with friends and play against each other in a “realistic” setting.

If I can’t play connected franchise mode, I’m not playing their terrible game. Thankfully, they were investigating the situation, and it would hopefully only be a few days before Connected Franchises were back up and running smoothly. No.

TWO DAYS! It took two days for them to get their second-most popular mode up and running! My word, the incompetence of EA Sports never ceases to amaze. Okay, whatever. Maybe it was a huge issue that needed to be resolved. At least it’s working again and people can get back to playing their friends. After all, the official Madden Direct account had given players the thumbs up on Connected Franchises.

This was tweeted out the next day. Oopsies! Turns out not everything is solved. I know we told you everything was good-to-go, but in reality, we just wanted our users back so that you could start spending money on our terrible product again. We don’t care about this game mode, so we put minimal effort into fixing it, and once the masking tape started to hold, we told you all that it was okay to go back. That wasn’t the case though.

That’s how the tweet above felt. EA Sports had been neglecting franchise mode, and now that there’s a problem, they basically don’t do anything, hoping that minimal effort will hold them over as it always has.

The Madden 23 news keeps getting worse

Unfortunately, minimal effort didn’t just not work this time, it may have destroyed several users’ files.

“Hello Madden Franchise Community,

We wanted to provide you with an update and next steps around your Online Franchise, CFM Leagues and FOTF saves from 12/28.

From the Developers: On Wednesday 12/28 around 2:45 pm EST, Players trying to access the Franchise server were given an error that leagues were unavailable. The issue persisted until 12:45 am EST on Thursday 12/29. Unfortunately, if you logged into Franchise leagues during this time, your data was affected due to a data storage issue that resulted in Franchise files being corrupted.

Note: Players and leagues who did not log in during that window, your leagues were not impacted and are currently safe to log into and play.

First off, we are sorry that this happened. We know how important your franchises are to you and we are actively working on a fix to restore some files via a backup as soon as possible. However, not all affected leagues can be restored. The team is currently projecting around 40% of leagues to be recovered. We will communicate an updated timeline next week around the potential restoration of save files from a backup.

If you logged in during the above window, we encourage you to start a new franchise as theEA mode is up and running. Stay tuned to @MaddenNFLDirect for updates around Franchise restoration.”

The above is an actual statement from the Madden developers. The “too long; didn’t give a shit” version of this statement is that anyone who tried to access franchise mode between December 28 at 2:45 pm ET and December 29 at 12:45 am ET, had their file corrupted and ultimately erased. For simply trying to play the game, players were gifted a huge middle finger, after Madden had told players it was alright to try to get back on Franchise Mode. Holy smokes, talk about your all-time fuck-ups. Talk about a hilarious gaffe, right? I’m sure all those players loved losing their six-year franchise where they built a 93 overall dynasty against their friends with an X-Factor rookie linebacker. I’m sure none of them were upset.

The statement does say that some of the leagues will potentially be restored, but they don’t offer a timeline for that fix. They also project that only 40 percent of files will be saved. In other words, more than half of all files are gone forever. In reality, the number is probably something like 5-10 percent and Madden is just trying to save a little bit of face by giving players a figure that gives them a little bit of hope that their franchise will be recovered. Pathetic.

Having trouble logging in is bad, but it’s not a problem only Madden has dealt with. Ultimately, if the problem was just that some users were having trouble logging in, even if it took two days to fix, players would have forgotten about that trouble relatively quickly. But to say that it’s okay to log in and punish franchise players for doing so…that’s a tear even Flex Tape would have trouble mending. How can their user base trust anything the company says anymore? I don’t care how many dances and touchdown animations you add to the game, I lost my 22-year-old X-factor quarterback Johnny Flanagan!

What’s sad is that Madden may literally try to save face by offering exactly what I said above — an emote or animation that can make DeVonta Smith floss or something. I know some people like that stuff, but if Madden does in fact do this as an “apology,” how little do they think of their fans? Yeah, I know you paid $70 on the game, and potentially more in MUT, only for us to erase your favorite save file. You have every right to be upset. So here’s an add-on that can make your players do a cool handshake, totally free. We’ll even throw in a twerking emote for only $4.99. We sure do love our players. Get out of here with that bullshit.

Like I said earlier, I haven’t played Madden at all in months, but franchise mode has always been what keeps me a customer, even if I don’t buy every game every year. If I lost my 99 overall defensive end Javonte Morant, my 97 overall cornerback Devin Burney, or my 98 overall tight end Allen Winn, each of whom I spent weeks developing into X-factors, I’d be done. Madden would be going straight into the trash, right next to Gotham Knights and Babylon’s Fall. In fact, I wasn’t even affected, and I might still do that. It’s just the right thing to do.

While I may not have been affected, fellow Deadspin writer DJ Dunson was one of the unfortunate souls whose league was tarnished by the mighty hammer of EA Sports’ incompetence. “I’m pissed. Very, very pissed,” said Dunson, rage fueling every keyboard press of that sentence. I don’t blame him. According to reports, it wasn’t just online franchises either. Even offline franchises succumbed to this awful corruption catastrophe. No one who wanted to play the only simulation-style football video game available was safe. All I can offer is my condolences.

Seriously, things aren’t going to get better if this doesn’t hurt EA’s pockets. Why would they try to improve their product if they know we, as a group, are going to keep buying the game and spending real money on fake money to spend on virtual cards? Stop buying Madden! They clearly don’t care about you, it’s time to stop caring about the game.



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Technology

EA Made PS2 Lord Of The Rings Game With Tiger Woods Golf Engine

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Image: EA / Kotaku

Making video games is very hard. It can take years of work to ship even a small game. One aspect that can take up a particularly large amount of time and resources is building a custom engine, which is why many devs utilize Unreal, Unity, or another pre-existing engine to help speed up development. That’s very common, but recently a really wild example from the PlayStation 2 days came to light in an interview with Glen Schofield, director of the new The Callisto Protocol.

Recently, the Callisto Protocol was released to…mixed reviews, let’s say (our own Ashley Bardhan liked how ambitious it was, despite some annoying difficulty spikes). Anyway, to help drum up publicity for the new horror game, director Glen Schofield has been going around doing interviews and whatnot. And two weeks ago he did a video with Wired in which he answered random tweets about game development. That’s where he revealed a fun bit of trivia about a popular Lord of the Rings game he worked on at EA.

In the Wired video, Schofield (who previously worked on Dead Space and Call of Duty) answers a question as to why devs don’t make their own engines anymore and instead use pre-existing tech. The director explains that it’s just too damn expensive and time-consuming to do this today, and that it’s almost always better to take an old engine and repurpose it, like he did at EA.

Wired

You see, when he was a producer on 2003 licensed beat ‘em up The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, his team spent a year working on a new engine for the game. But things were going slowly and the game had a hard deadline to hit. So he looked around at the various other engines EA was using for its games at that time to find some tech they could repurpose. And weirdly enough, he came to the conclusion that the latest Tiger Woods golf game had the perfect engine.

“Lord of the Rings is about large areas and then sort of a castle on the end or something, a fortress. What’s like that? Tiger Woods!” explained Schofield, “Long areas, and at the end is where you go get food, where you’re done. And so we took the Tiger Woods engine and turned that into a Lord of the Rings engine.”

Now, this is funny and interesting enough on its own. But one last part came to light earlier today on Twitter. It turns out, according to a former EA dev, that some modified Lord of the Rings visual effects code was later re-used on a PSP Tiger Woods game to create puffs of smoke during ball impact.

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Apparently the code of the PSP Tiger Woods game also contains references to Gandalf and other LotR characters, too. As ever, game development is messy and endlessly fascinating.



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Technology

The Sims 4 Modding Is About To Become Easier

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Screenshot: EA

Amid fervor for news on The Sims 5 at today’s Sims Summit event, The Sims 4 team announced it would create a new hub for custom content in its current-generation game.

Custom content, or CC to die-hard Simmers, is a core part of the most popular Sims games. It can be in the form of hair, clothes, nails, or skin textures in the Create-a-Sim maker, or it can look like Build Mode features, such as furniture, wall and floor styles, plants, or other items. Bigger mods can change how the entire game is played. There is an enormous amount of The Sims CC out there, but it’s often scattered across sites, something Electronic Arts hopes to change.

Currently, The Sims Resource stands as one of the biggest destinations for CC of all kinds. But others utilize Tumblr or follow the websites of well-known creators like Deaderpool, who makes the ubiquitous MC Command Center mod.

While many players use CC and mods on PC (console users can’t use CC), others continue to shy away from it. Sometimes that’s because of the lacking user experience at ad-laden sites like The Sims Resource, which offers a monthly subscription to remove both ads and download wait times. (The site is free to use otherwise.) In other cases, people worry about malware and spyware that may be tacked onto their virtual goods. In its presentation, EA promised a CC utopia where players could download “safe” content. It should be noted that many sites do check what’s uploaded. The Sims Resource, for example, says it has a submissions team that makes sure content is appropriate, virus-free, and of decent quality.

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However, this wonderful place comes with a major caveat: You have to be invited to upload your work and join what EA calls “The Mod Squad.” What criteria the team is looking for exactly or whether that will continue after launch, no one knows yet. (It seems likely that more risque CC will be excluded.) Existing sites are much more open, which is crucial for those just getting started.

This seems even more exclusive than EA-operated The Sims 3 Exchange, which shut down in 2018. That also served as a hub for custom content uploads and downloads but wasn’t invite-only.

The Mod Squad and its CC haven isn’t here yet, and we don’t know when it’ll come (The Sims 4 team only vaguely said players can keep checking back for updates). But when it does, it’ll be interesting to see what ripple effects it might have on the independent and creator-driven Sims modding sites.

 

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Technology

Madden Streamers Are Going On ‘Strike’ Over Gambling Odds

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Screenshot: EA Sports

Some of the biggest streamers in the Madden community have announced they’re going on “pack strike,” creating a hashtag and refusing to spend any money on Madden 23’s Ultimate Team mode until publisher Electronic Arts makes some changes.

What’s Ultimate Team?

Both Madden and FIFA have wildly-popular multiplayer game modes called Ultimate Team, which let users create their own teams of all-time greats. The catch is that you have to obtain your players via cards, and those cards are sold blind in sealed virtual packs, and those packs are paid for with real money.

As Polygon reports, the streamers—who for sports games like this are a huge part of the online community—have created the hashtag #packstrike, and are urging all players, not just their content-creating peers, to refuse to spend a cent on Ultimate Team until EA addresses their concerns.

Zirksee, speaking for both himself and “other creators in the community,” shared the group’s demands earlier today. He says they’re asking for, among other things, “better rerolls” and “better pack odds overall” when opening the more expensive player packs, as well as the restoration of rewards that used to offered for games (including some that were initially offered during the first week of Madden 23’s release) that have since been removed:

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Like I’ve said only this week, there is no number of tweets, reviews or comments that can make publishers walk back the extent to which they’ve monetised major sports game series in 2022. The only thing that moves the needle with these companies is money, and so the only way for disgruntled players to get their point across is to withhold that money.

So seeing content creators mobilise as a means of protest is heartening! Though it’s also wild to consider that a decade of turning sports games into shakedowns has normalised things to the extent that people are “striking” not to have the modes thrown out, or made entirely free considering you have already spent $60 on the game. They instead want some of the game’s most exploitative systems made a little less exploitative.

It’s like asking your prison warden for fluffier pillows. It remains to be seen of course how successful this “strike” will be, but if it does have some kind of impact with EA Sports, I’d hope this at least sets a precedent for sports game fans: If they’re really as sick of this constant nickel-and-diming as much as they say they are, to start taking some more drastic action.

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Technology

Amazon set to buy Electronic Arts

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According to GLHF sources, Amazon will announce today that it has put in a formal offer to acquire Electronic Arts (EA), the publisher behind Apex Legends, FIFA, Madden, and more.

Rumors have been circling online for a few weeks about a potential EA buyout, with Apple, Disney, and Amazon listed as potential buyers. As per our sources, Amazon has finally made an offer.

It’s a smart business move from Amazon, which is also making big moves in television. After the success of The Witcher and Arcane on Netflix — both shows built around big video games — Amazon could potentially use EA’s franchises as settings for new shows. Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dead Space — there’s plenty of potential in EA’s library for transmedia opportunities.

This news comes after a range of unprecedented acquisitions and consolidation in the video game space, with the biggest of them being Microsoft’s purchase of Acitivison Blizzard for $69 billion.

According to our sources, the announcement will be made later today. We’ve reached out to Amazon and EA for comment and will update you if we hear anything back.

Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF. 

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Technology

Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit Rights Sold To Embracer Group

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Image: Lord of the Rings

The Embracer Group, who are slowly buying any and every video game publisher and studio on the market, just announced that they have purchased Middle-earth Enterprises, the company that owns the big-and-small-screen rights to most of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most important works, including Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

Some background (and please bear with me, this gets complicated): Middle-earth Enterprises used to be a division of The Saul Zaentz Company, a Hollywood production studio that in 1976 managed to pick up the rights to pretty much everything to do with Tolkien except the publication of the books themselves. Those rights were used to make the 1978 animated feature, and ever since have only been licensed out to other companies—an operation overseen by Middle-earth Enterprises—never fully sold.

That means everything from Peter Jackson’s films to EA’s video games were only (expensively) borrowing the Lord of the Rings license (Amazon’s upcoming TV series, meanwhile, is a whole other story). Final ownership still lay with The Saul Zaentz Company, and covered “a vast intellectual property catalogue and worldwide rights to motion pictures, video games, board games, merchandising, theme parks and stage productions relating to the iconic fantasy literary works The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien”.

Or, it did. Until now.

The Saul Zaentz Company floated the sale of their rights earlier this year for an eye-popping $2 billion, and while Embracer’s purchase price wasn’t disclosed in their announcement, you’d assume the price they paid would be somewhere in that ballpark. [Update: in a separate announcement, Embracer say the total cost for all the acquisitions they made today was SEK8.2 billion, which is around USD$770 million].

As the announcement says, the purchase covers pretty much everything you’d associate with Lord of the Rings beyond the publishing of the books themselves (whose rights are held by HarperCollins), including:

Key upcoming works set in Middle-earth, in which Middle-earth Enterprises has financial interests, include the much-heralded Amazon series The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power which will premiere on September 2, 2022, set thousands of years before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; the animated movie The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (Warner Bros), set for release in 2024, and the mobile game The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth (Electronic Arts).

Note that by purchasing Middle-earth Enterprises itself, Embracer doesn’t necessarily need to go cancel or reassign any existing Lord of the Rings rights agreements. Warner Bros. has held the motion picture license since the 1990s, for example, that’s how Peter Jackson’s trilogy was made, and the upcoming anime is clearly unaffected since it’s specifically highlighted in Embracer’s announcement.

As for what Embracer might want to do with the license in the future, that’s spelled out in the press release as well:

Other opportunities include exploring additional movies based on iconic characters such as Gandalf, Aragorn, Gollum, Galadriel, Eowyn and other characters from the literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and continue to provide new opportunities for fans to explore this fictive world through merchandising and other experiences.

With Embracer owning both a ton of video game studios and also board game company Asmodee (who in turn own Fantasy Flight), you can expect a ton of licensed games to follow suit as well (note that Asmodee already own the Lord of the Rings license for board games).

Of course it wouldn’t be an Embracer announcement with news that, alongside the Middle-earth Enterprises purchase, the company also bought a bunch of other stuff today, including physical copy specialists Limited Run Games, Tripwire Interactive (Killing Floor, Chivalry), Tuxedo Labs (Teardown) and, in a bizarrely poetic move given the buyers in question, Japanese studio Tatsujin. Their boss is Masahiro Yuge, a co-founder of Toaplan, the developers of Zero Wing, the game that the “All your base belong to us” meme comes from.

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Technology

FIFA 23 Accidentally Sells For Six Cents, EA Honors The Mistake

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Image: EA Sports

FIFA 23 is currently up for preorder around the world, and is supposed to be a full-price retail release, but in one particular market on one particular store, customers could get one hell of a bargain.

Last month, anyone browsing the Epic Games Store in India would have seen that while the standard edition of FIFA 23 cost ₹3,499 (USD$44), the Ultimate Edition—which should have been ₹4,799 (USD$60) was instead listed at ₹4.80.

The error was first discovered in late July
Image: Twitter

That is not a sale price, that is an error, one where the store has clearly put the decimal point in the wrong spot. ₹4.80 works out to be six cents, and as word spread about the savings, users flocked to the store and bought the game. And not just Indian gamers, either; once news got out, fans were sharing across social media ways for players outside the region to set their accounts to the Indian Epic Games Store so they could get in on the error as well.

Now, this kind of thing isn’t exactly rare in the realms of online shopping, but often stores will cancel orders when the discrepancy is this great, so I don’t think too many people would have been expecting to have actually got hold of the more expensive version of FIFA 23 for six cents.

But they have! Via PC Gamer, EA Sports have this week issued a statement saying:

A few weeks back, we scored a pretty spectacular own-goal when we inadvertently offered FIFA 23 pre-purchase on the Epic Games Store at an incorrect price. It was our mistake, and we wanted to let you know that we’ll be honoring all pre-purchases made at that price.

That’s nice for anyone who managed to score the savings, but let’s be real: EA isn’t really missing out on much here. While FIFA has always been and still is a full-price sports game that features singleplayer modes, in recent years the franchise’s Ultimate Team multiplayer mode has been making the company billions, so I’m sure the math on “Money lost on initial six cent sales” vs “Money made long-term through Ultimate Team” still worked out in the company’s favour.

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Technology

Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo: Video game earnings round-up

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A gamer plays on Sony’s Playstation 5 console at his home in Seoul.

Yelim Lee | AFP via Getty Images

The giants of the video game world saw their sales slide in the second quarter, as initial tailwinds from the Covid pandemic faded.

In the three months ended June, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo each posted disappointing results in their respective gaming businesses.

The numbers reflect a broader contraction in consumer spending on video games. Americans spent $12.4 billion on games in the second quarter, according to market research firm NPD, down 13% year-on-year.

Several factors are to blame, not least the relaxing of pandemic restrictions, with people eschewing home entertainment options in favor of outdoor activities.

Ongoing shortages of semiconductor equipment haven’t helped either.

“The growth of the overall game market has recently decelerated as opportunities have increased for users to get out of [the] home as Covid-19 infections have subsided in key markets,” Hiroki Totoki, Sony’s chief financial officer, said on the company’s earnings call last month.

Sony reported a 2% decline in sales year-on-year at its gaming unit in the June quarter, while operating profits plunged almost 37%. The company also issued a gloomy outlook, cutting its full-year profit forecast by 16%.

The main reason? People are spending less time playing games and more time going out.

Total gameplay time among the PlayStation player base was down 15%, much lower than initially forecast by the company.

‘Covid effect’ disappears

Gaming was one of the big beneficiaries of the Covid pandemic, with publishers experiencing bumper growth as consumers spent more time indoors.

But with consumers’ spending habits shifting post-lockdown, and inflation running hot, the industry is taking a hit.

At Microsoft, overall gaming revenues sank 7% year-on-year. Sales of the company’s Xbox consoles declined 11%, while gaming content and services revenues dipped 6%.

The declines were “driven by lower engagement hours and monetization in third-party and first-party content,” Amy Hood, chief financial officer of Microsoft, said on the firm’s earnings call last week.

Activision Blizzard, the embattled game publisher being acquired by Microsoft, reported a 70% plunge in net profit and a 29% drop in revenues.

The Call of Duty-maker blamed the slump on weak sales of the latest title in the popular shooter franchise.

Ubisoft, the firm behind Assassin’s Creed, posted a 10% decline in net bookings.

Michael Pachter, managing director at Wedbush Securities, said the disappointing numbers were largely driven by comparisons with “outsized performance” a year ago. In other words, companies couldn’t match the wildly high numbers they posted in 2021.

“Everyone saw record numbers during shelter-in-place, with catalog sales of older titles leading the way,” Pachter told CNBC. “That set up an impossible comparison, and the year-over-year declines were well telegraphed and were expected.”

Electronic Arts was one of the rare companies to defy the gaming contraction, posting a 50% rise in profits and revenue growth of 14%.

Console shortage lingers

A major factor hampering performance in the gaming world is the continued scramble for key console hardware.

Nintendo saw a 15% slide in operating profit in the April-June period. The company behind the Super Mario franchise blamed the weak performance on the global semiconductor shortage, which meant it was unable to produce and sell as many Switch consoles as it wanted.

Nintendo sold 3.43 million units of its portable Switch console in the quarter, down 23% year-over-year, while software sales slumped 8.6%, to 41.4 million units.

Sony sold 2.4 million PlayStation 5 consoles in the quarter, slightly higher than the 2.3 million units sold in the same period a year ago. The firm is hoping a lifting of lockdown measures in the crucial manufacturing hub of Shanghai and a holiday season sales drive will help it reach its target of shipping 18 million PS5 units in 2022.

“The slow rollout of hardware is one of the biggest contributors,” Pachter said. “New hardware purchasers tend to buy a lot of software, and PlayStation and Switch sales have been supply constrained.”

The remote-working trend has also caused delays for new game releases, limiting the pool of games people want to buy. Microsoft, for example, delayed the release of its highly-anticipated sci-fi epic Starfield until early 2023, while Ubisoft pushed back the launch of a game based on the Avatar film franchise.

More pain to come?

Spiraling prices for everything from gas to groceries and fears of an impending recession could spell further trouble for the sector.

The global games and services market is forecast to contract 1.2% year-on-year to $188 billion in 2022, the first annual decline in over a decade, according to data from Ampere Analysis.

“The cost of living squeeze means added pressure on household budgets,” Piers Harding-Rolls, research director at Ampere, told CNBC.

“The impact is likely to be felt on high ticket items which could include console hardware, although limited availability and pent up demand especially for the higher-end consoles means impact will be minimal at present.

Stock picks and investing trends from CNBC Pro:

Harding-Rolls added: “There could also be some additional pressure on high in-game spending as gamers adjust their discretionary spending.”

Some firms are betting a push toward subscription products will help counter the effect of waning game sales.

According to Microsoft, growth in the company’s Xbox Game Pass membership plan helped cushion the blow of softer demand for consoles and games. While Microsoft didn’t give an updated subscriber number for the service, it had over 25 million subscribers in total as of January.

Sony recently revamped its PS Plus subscription service, and is hoping the move will help combat the recent tail-off in gaming activity. PS Plus subscribers totaled 47.3 million, according to Sony’s quarterly report, slightly down from the previous quarter.

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Technology

EA Backtracks On Sims 4 Mod Restrictions Following Backlash

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Screenshot: EA

Last month, EA announced new rules and restrictions on paid mods, early access, and how creators can advertise their creations. And this led to many unhappy responses and ongoing controversy within the Sims community.

The Sims 4 might have been released in 2014, but the life simulator continues to get massive official updates and boasts a large, active community of modders who regularly produce user-made content for the game on PC. Some of these creators make a living selling mods or taking donations from players who enjoy their work. So it’s not surprising that the July 26 update to EA’s policy—which outlined that selling mods or locking them behind a Patreon sub would no longer be allowed—set off a firestorm online.

In the update posted to the official EA Sims 4 help site, the company explained that mods can’t be “sold, licensed, or rented for a fee” and that mods can’t add or support “monetary transactions of any type.” What this means is you can’t stick your own digital store inside of The Sims 4 and sell NFT shirts or sell your mods via a website.

EA did acknowledge that developing a mod takes time and resources and allows for creators to sell advertisements on their modding sites and to take donations, but creators can’t include that stuff in the game itself.

Read More: Sims 4 Update Accidentally Adds Incest

But when this support page first went live, the part mentioning paid Early Access being allowed, wasn’t included. This led to a large backlash as many content creators and modders use the Early Access model to release mods to dedicated fans willing to pay before everything is working properly or finished. The idea is that once the mod is done, the devs release it for free and that paid period helps support them while working on finishing the mod.

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Up to $200 off

Vertagear Summer Sales 2022

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Vertagear has a number of gaming chairs on sale right now. One in particular that caught our eye is the PL4500 which is embroidered with Swarovski crystals down to $500. You can also get one of their RGB kits to add a set of lights to either the top cutout sections around the headrest or a bottom LED kit for $200 to light up underneath like your chair is in Need for Speed: Underground 2.

EA seemingly coming after this fairly old system that was mostly accepted by the community went over about as well as you’d expect. It’s also quite a turn as the publisher is typically supportive of its Sims modding community. Gamespot talked to some content creators about the situation, with some explaining selling access to mods was how they were able to survive.

“Patreon early access is one of the only reasons I can afford my own medications, food, pet care, and apartment so I can live above my disabled dad to take care of him,” Sims 4 modder JellyPaws told Gamespot.

After a lot of backlash from players and some bad press, EA has now changed course and earlier today updated the help article to include a specific carve-out for paid Early Access. While straight-up selling mods or locking them behind a paywall is still a no-no, this new update does allow for the community-approved Patreon system.

Here’s the text EA has added to confirm it is okay with this type of paid mod system.

Offer an early access incentive for a reasonable amount of time. After a reasonable early access period, all users must be able to access the Mods in full for free regardless of whether they donate.

However, while this helped put out some of the fire, others are still nervous about how vague this new rule seems to be. How long can a mod remain in Early Access before EA declares it must be removed and published for free? EA only says a “reasonable amount of time” but doesn’t specify, likely to allow the publisher some wiggle room as they evaluate mods on a case-by-case basis.

Kotaku has contacted EA about the Early Access rule and asked for clarification.

For now, Sims fans and creators like KawaiiFoxita seem cautiously optimistic about the situation. Of course, if EA reveals that a “reasonable amount of time” is like five days or a week, it’s likely to find itself in another mess.

   



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Business

PayPal, Airbnb, Match Group, Caesars and more

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A sign is posted outside of the PayPal headquarters in San Jose, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Check out the companies making headlines in extended trading.

Match Group — Shares of the dating app operator tumbled as much as 23% after the company reported revenue of $795 million for the second quarter, compared with FactSet estimates of $803.9 million. Match also issued weak guidance around adjusted operating income and revenue for the current quarter.

Solaredge Technologies – The solar-power stock tanked nearly 13% in after-hours trading following disappointing quarterly results. Solaredge reported an EPS of 95 cents, below analysts’ expectation of 88 cents per share, according to FactSet. Revenue also came in shy of estimates.

PayPal — The payments giant’s shares soared 11% after hours following stronger-than-expected second-quarter results and an increase in its forecast. PayPal also revealed it has entered into an information-sharing agreement with Elliott Management.

SoFi — Shares climbed more than 7% after the personal finance company reported a beat on the top and bottom lines. “While the political, fiscal, and economic landscapes continue to shift around us, we have maintained strong and consistent momentum in our business,” SoFi CEO Anthony Noto said in a statement.

Airbnb — Shares of Airbnb fell about 10% in extended trading after the vacation home rental company posted weaker-than-expected revenue for the second quarter. The company also reported more than 103 million booked nights and experiences, the largest quarterly number ever for the company but short of StreetAccount estimates of 106.4 million.

Advanced Micro Devices — AMD’s shares fell nearly 5% despite reporting strong quarterly earnings and revenue, after the chipmaker issued a weaker-than-anticipated third-quarter forecast. The chipmaker said it expected $6.7 billion in revenue during the current quarter, plus or minus $200 million. Analysts expected $6.83 billion.

Caesars Entertainment — The casino company lost about 2% after it reported a quarterly loss of 57 cents per share, which was 74 cents lower than analysts had expected. It also reported a Caesars Digital loss of $69 million, compared with $2 million for the comparable prior-year period.

Robinhood — Robinhood slid about 2% after reporting it will cut its headcount by some 23%, after previously laying off 9% in April, and posting a decline in monthly active users and assets under custody for the second quarter. The investing app operator released its results a day ahead of schedule.

Starbucks — The coffee chain saw shares edge higher by more than 2% after it reported better-than-expected quarterly results, despite lockdowns in China weighing on its performance. Within the U.S., however, net sales rose 9% to $8.15 billion and same-store sales grew 3%.

— CNBC’s Sarah Min and Yun Li contributed reporting.

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