EA Launches The Sims Social on Tencent's Qzone

We told you a couple months ago about EA’s plan to bring Mo Ni Shi Guang — a.k.a. The Sims Social — to Tencent’s Qzone platform. Yesterday, those plans came to fruition when the game was officially launched in China (the English version has been available on Facebook for quite a while, but that obviously doesn’t help Chinese users much).

In honor of the launch, and because it’s been ages since I last played a Sims game, I decided to take Mo Ni Shi Guang for a spin. To play it, you’ll need a QQ account and a Qzone account, but most users will already have these accounts and if they don’t, it only takes a few seconds to set up. Then the game opens in a browser, much like Sina Weibo’s web games.

In terms of gameplay, it’s basically a watered-down version of the original Sims game. You create a character and then guide them through life by clicking on things in their house and neighborhood to get them to do various activities. You’ve also got to monitor various meters to make sure they don’t get too lonely, bored, hungry, sleepy, dirty, etc. You can also buy new clothes, expand your house, develop relationships with neighbors, etc.

Unfortunately, Mo Ni Shi Guang is crippled by the same sort of gameplay restrictions that make I’ve seen again and again in Chinese web games for the sake of monetization. And sure, when a game is free, you need to monetize it somehow sooner or later. But Mo Ni Shi Guang ticks all the evil monetization boxes: it is constantly harassing you to spam your friends with promotional weibo posts, it has an arbitrary “energy” limit that prevents you from doing too much at one time without spending real money, it has a confusing in-game economy that includes multiple kinds of money…ugh. And I ran into all of this within my first twenty minutes of playing. The end result was that there was not, and will never be, a second twenty minutes of playing.

Still I’m not the target audience, and supposedly the game got rave reviews from Chinese gamers while it was in closed beta. Now that it’s out in the open for anyone to try, though, we’ll see what the larger community really thinks of it.