It’s official: 2026 will see the end of EA’s app-based life sim, The Sims Mobile. The app is set to shut down its servers on January 6th, rendering it completely unplayable.
The Sims Mobile’s closure could be for all kinds of complex reasons. Just a few reasons could include high server hosting costs, stiff competition, and a shift in focus to drive the development of Project Rene.
Whatever the reasons are, the impact on fans is clear: the rug is being pulled from underneath their virtual living rooms.
This isn’t the first time this has happened to a Sims title. Far from it. The Sims actually has a long list of lost media, ranging from defunct server-based titles to games cancelled before they were even released. That’s without even touching on the vast amount of currently unavailable abandonware.
I did a little bit of digital archaeology and managed to dig up quite a few lost Sims titles. Let’s take a look at some of what I found.
The Sims Online (2002)
Starting with one of the better-known lost Sims titles, The Sims Online was EA’s take on turning their dollhouse simulator into a massively multiplayer online game (MMO). The usually single-player game was totally transformed through the introduction of chat rooms, leaderboards, and a complex economy.
The premise for The Sims Online was simple. It took The Sims 1 and put it online, connecting you directly with other simmers. Think of it kind of like Second Life, except before Second Life came out, and with those good old janky Sims 1 aesthetics.
Of course, chat rooms and leaderboards weren’t the only way The Sims Online switched up the franchise. Another significant difference was the ability for its users to engage in plenty of illicit behaviour. Which, according to an article published by Reason.com in 2004, was incredibly popular on the platform.
Now, you might assume – like I did – that this was an unintended consequence of introducing a social element to The Sims, and connecting it to the World Wide Web. However, this may not be the case. At a GDC Talk in 2001, The Sims’ creator Will Wright acknowledged that they “counted on” the community making anything they could imagine: houses, hotels, businesses, nightclubs, casinos, “bordellos”– wait, repeat that?
So, now you know. The Sims Online was a wild time. Even long before Wicked Whims was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye.
What led to The Sims Online shutting down?
Despite its eccentricities, or perhaps because of them, the MMO wasn’t actually all that commercially successful. The playerbase consistently fell massively short of EA’s (rather high) expectations, with a peak of roughly 105,000 players total in 2003, and a sharp fall to follow.
It’s no surprise, really. Besides the overall cursed vibes of almost everything about it, The Sims Online cost an absolutely stunning $49.99 on launch. Keep in mind that this was back in 2002, so that $50 would actually be worth around $90 in 2025.
I’ll admit, it’s expensive to run The Sims 4 with much DLC, but that just seems like a lot. Especially for a game that could totally shut down when EA was done with it.
EA noticed the error in their ways a couple months into The Sims Online’s lifespan, and dropped the price to $29.99 (around $55).
Still steep. And, as it turned out, not enough to save the title.
The upfront fee wasn’t the only cost associated with The Sims Online. Simmers also had to pay a monthly fee of around $10 to keep their profiles alive. I guess it wasn’t just the game mechanics themselves that were all about making money.
The long goodbye
The shutdown of The Sims Online is a slightly tough one to explain. Not because it didn’t make sense – it made perfect sense that it would shut down – but because it kind of happened twice.
The Sims Online as we’ve discussed it so far existed from March 2002 all the way through until February 2008. Then, as the title approached its sixth anniversary, it changed shape a little.
EA were ready to announce a new, free-to-play rework of their struggling MMO, titled EA-Land. This take on the title lumped in a few social media and web integrations, with a firm focus on the then-popular Facebook. Of which I’m sure didn’t age badly at all.
The shake-up was a critical bomb, and by April 2008, EA announced the end was nigh. On August 1st, The Sims Online was set to be no more.
The Sims Online 2.0 and 3.0: You Can (Not) Rebuild
Despite a lack of commercial success, The Sims Online is well-remembered by fans and digital archivists. The MMO’s final moments were recorded for Archiving Virtual Worlds and Preserving Virtual Worlds; an effort to create research records of now long-lost media. Meanwhile, two fan-made recreations of The Sims Online exist.
The first fan recreation of the title was known as FreeSO. This ran from 2017 through ’til 2024, when servers were, once again, closed down. It was a totally legal take on The Sims Online, and it was even EA-approved.
Following on from the end of FreeSO, came LegacySO, another fan project. This incredibly meta take on things rebooted both the original Sims Online, as well as FreeSO itself. It’s still up and running, should you want to give it a go.
The Sims Mobile afterparty over on LegacySO, anyone?
The Sims Social (2011)
The Sims had long since seen the end of Facebook with the failed EA-Land. In fact, by the time 2011 rolled around, Simmers would be able to play with life directly through their social media pages.
Enter The Sims Social: A Sims game you could play without even closing Facebook. Apparently, this was an appealing (or novel) option for many, with Playfish’s take on life sims scoring more than a massive 65 million players throughout its lifespan.
It all started in the made-up world of Littlehaven. Here, your Simselves would work on their skills, climb the career ladder, develop personalities, and fulfil their needs however you or they saw fit. At face value, it really seemed like a normal Sims title, much like any other in the franchise before it.
But why Facebook?
So what set The Sims Social apart from its predecessors, so much to legitimise it being built into Facebook? I’m glad you asked. The Sims Social emphasised its ‘social’ aspect by encouraging you to interact with your Facebook Friends’ Simselves along the way.
Actually, based on the inclusion of the Social motive, it seems like it was imperative that your Sims did so. Otherwise, they’d become deeply unhappy, go rogue, and totally ignore your wishes.
Based on a headline in The Guardian from The Sims Social’s peak back in August 2011, “See what happens when your Sims get off with your Facebook friends”, I’m sure it’s not so hard to imagine what direction these social interactions could go in.
Indeed, the curious direction of The Sims Social’s, well, social elements is reflected in a press release shared to Infinite Sims at the time:
“Pursuing the sweeter aspects of life, The Sims Social encourages players to extend a hand to their neighbors, build meaningful friendships, and experience the thrill of falling in love. They can explore the romantic concept of a first kiss or even the playful notion of ‘woohoo’. However, for those who prefer a dash of mischief, they can indulge in pulling off pranks or partake in certain mischievous acts like disrupting friends, sprinkling their neighbor’s lawn with virtual pee, or adopting a heartbreaker or even a womanizer persona. The behavior of the Sims is impressively diverse, mirroring the players’ personalities, and this uniqueness makes The Sims Social stand out amidst other games.”
I don’t know where to even start with the absolute chaos of that one. It’s maybe better left unsaid. Oh, and you can find similar sentiments over on the EA website.
Considering the lost nature of The Sims Social – and the fact I hardly remember playing it at the time – it’s extremely challenging to check out exactly what this bizarre title’s deal is. That’s often the way with poorly archived video games. But based on what information remains out there, it sounds like it was… A lot.
Gift, gift, gift, spend, spend, spend
Okay, so we know that social interaction is a core element of The Sims Social. It makes sense. It’s in the name, after all.
But another significant chunk of The Sims Social’s gameplay loop was maybe a little less self-explanatory. At least, it’s not if you don’t remember the ‘hay’day of Farmville, Pet Society, and other Facebook-based social games.
Gift giving was a major part of The Sims Social’s mechanics. Using your Facebook Friend List, you could send and receive gifts to unlock items, share ingredients, finish quests, and gain skills. Seems to make sense, right?
It makes sense, until you don’t have enough friends to get all the gifts you need. Which was, apparently, a very common problem.
Not to worry, though. This problem was already accounted for. You could pay to skip tasks using one of The Sims Social’s in-game currencies, SimsCash. And how did you get that? With real-world currency.
When did The Sims Social shut down?
In spite of The Sims Social’s initial popularity, it was an incredibly short-lived endeavour. The Sims Social shut down in June 2013, less than two years after its launch.
It’s a slightly puzzling closure, in some ways. The title snapped up over 16 million players in its first week, regularly ranked among the most popular Facebook games, and it even took home the Social Networking Game of the Year award at the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards.
But the gaming landscape changes quickly, and social media trends shift even quicker. By November 2012, it had fallen out of even the top 25 most-played Facebook games, as everyone shifted their attention to other trendy titles.
The Sims Carnival (2008)
Here’s a more niche title that you might not have come across before. The Sims Carnival is different from the two other titles we’ve talked about so far. Firstly, because it kind of made up two different product lines, and secondly, because one of those product lines focused entirely on fan-made games.
Technically, only one of these two product lines has been totally lost. According to a post on the official EA Forums, it’s still totally possible to play one line of Sims Carnival games if you have access to the right discs to install it. So, those titles are technically just abandonware, rather than lost media.
Meanwhile, SimsCarnival.com (a now dead link) is where all the lost content was originally. It was an EA-owned online community where users were encouraged to create games to share with others online. Think kind of like a kid-friendly, corporate tie-in version of Newsgrounds or itch.io.
The site also came with a suite of creative tools and asset packs, ensuring that you had access to basically everything you needed to make fun little flash games. After you built them, you could host them through the site itself and embed them on your own personal sites.
I guess the intention was to make it kind of like a digital carnival, packed with Sims-infused ringtoss games and coconut shies. But, unfortunately, the carnival closed eventually in 2011, seemingly disappearing all those fan-made mini-games in the process.
What’s do we know about SimsCarnival.com and what’s left of it now?
Very little remains on the internet about SimsCarnival.com. Whatever’s left is mostly tangled up with information about the other product line. I could, however, find this one old press release on an archived IGN webpage. If you can manage to peer around the gigantic “Shootmania: Storm” pop-up window, there’s some interesting context in there about the site’s features during its Beta and Alpha phases.
The press release teases a playlist function, allowing players to put all of their favourite games from the carnival back-to-back in “one experience”. It also discussed a ”High Score” system, complete with daily, weekly, and all-time leadership boards. It didn’t make it clear what those scores would be based on, although I would assume it was based on some combination of the number of games created, played, accumulated scores across games, or ratings for your original works.
Outside of the press release, most coverage of SimsCarnival.com is also now missing from the web, besides a handful of archived pages here and there. Despite that, one post from Beyond Sims really comes in clutch – not only because it preserves the message shared when the site reached the end of the line, but also because it suggests that not all of that content will be lost forever:
“Beginning January 17, 2011, content will not be accessible including created or modified content as well as embedded links to games on The Sims Carnival. However, you can download custom game files and the Game Creator before the service ends if you’d like to play locally.”
Presumably, that means that somewhere out there, someone must have at least a partial record of what the site looked like at its peak, or some record of their favourite games from the carnival on an old hard drive somewhere.
Incidentally, if that’s you, my email inbox is open for a chat…
SimsVille (2000ish)
One more long-gone Sims title I want to touch on today is SimsVille. Iwan already went through this in depth over here, so I’ll keep it brief, but it really warrants a mention in this list specifically, because of how much influence it had on later titles.
SimsVille was going to be a kind of blend of SimCity and The Sims 1. Part life sim and part city builder, your goal was to populate and manage a town while taking care of everybody in it. Each household housed individual Sims, who had their own motives. You’d have to make sure said Sims could take care of themselves as well as possible using facilities you dotted around town for them.
SimsVille was eventually cancelled in 2001, after being in development for roughly two years and being roughly 60% complete. It was set to land less than six months after it was cancelled. At the time, it was reported that the title was cancelled due to Maxis having concerns over quality control issues by both Gamespot and Eurogamer.
Of course, this title is a little different from the others mentioned in this list, insofar as it was a cancelled title rather than a game that was lost to server closures. However, without any kind of prototype or MVP out there to try out or archive, it’s as good as lost media for all intents and purposes.
Again, unless you happen to have access to anything like that, in which case my inbox is still open…
Was that the end of the road to SimsVille?
I mean, yes and no. On one hand, yes, being cancelled was absolutely the end of SimsVille itself. No doubt about it.
On the other hand, some elements of SimsVille did find their way – and it didn’t even take long. According to a Gamespot interview with Patrick Buechner, Maxis’ Director of Marketing at the time, some elements of SimsVille actually worked their way into subsequent Sims 1 Expansion Packs.
Specifically, SimsVille was borne from a simple request: Simmers wanted their Sims to exist outside of their houses. This sowed the seed for SimsVille, but also for The Sims 1: Hot Date, which allowed Sims to finally hitch a cab and go downtown.
In a manner of speaking, this means that some parts of SimsVille live on in other Sims titles to this day. At least, the parts that players wanted the most do, anyway. Similarly, other elements of SimsVille have worked their way into a couple of other city-building games since, like SimCity 4.
Is all lost for these Sims titles forever?
Honestly, that’s a big question to answer. They’re no longer around in the form they were, that’s for sure.
Community and academic preservation efforts can go a really long way to help retain as much of what’s left as possible for any kind of lost games, though. Thankfully, that seems to have happened in the case of some of these releases, like The Sims Online.
With a bit of luck, some similar efforts will be made around The Sims Mobile before that finally shuts down in January 2026. Otherwise, that’s just even more content that’ll go the journey once servers shut down.
