Alphaville Rises

By the summer of 2002, the team behind The Sims Online had worked on the game for more than two years. But now, the project had to enter its most critical phase: the play test. Unlike single-player games, which are rarely tested on consumers before their release, a massively multiplayer game has to go through months of rigorous consumer testing. The decision to do a play test is for both technical and creative reasons. Technically, the development team has to stress-test the game's servers to see if they can handle tens of thousands of simultaneous users. On the creative end, the team needs to see if the design will meet with acceptance from consumers. That last point is especially important for an online game, since consumers are expected to pay a $10 monthly subscription fee to keep playing. This is not just a game; it's a service. Therefore, consumer feedback plays an important role in shaping the final few months of development. "We didn't want the game to look like Frankenstein's monster where we sewed 23 features in at the last minute and you see the stitch marks," explains Gordon Walton.

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The Sims Online producer Virginia McArthur.
For many on the Sims Online team, the idea of releasing a play test was a scary proposition. "There was a lot of trepidation about putting out the play test," explains producer Virginia McArthur. After all, first impressions are everything. Even if the game was still in development, consumers would likely form their opinions based on their initial experience with the product. But everyone knew a play test had to happen sooner or later. "If we didn't have a play test leading up to release, everyone would walk into a wasteland on the first day of release," says Kyle Brink, the game's community manager. "We're counting on the players to seed the world with their creativity, so we needed them in there early."

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The Sims Online would require a play test with tens of thousands of people before it could ship.
Not surprisingly, there was no shortage of beta testers interested in playing the game: The Sims newsletter had more than half a million subscribers. Ideally, the team wanted to have about a hundred thousand beta testers in the game before launch, with at least 40,000 of them online simultaneously to test whether the game's servers could handle a baseball-stadium-sized crowd. But ramping up to that many testers would take months. And by mid-August, the play test hadn't started. "The play test just kept getting pushed back and back," says Wright. "And that meant that the play test period kept getting shorter and shorter."

In early September the team was finally ready to start sending out CDs to Sims players. While many Maxis employees had played the game for a few weeks to get ready for the public test, Wright knew that he was only days away from finding out what consumers really thought of the game. Would players take to the idea of entertaining each other? Would hard-core players from games like EverQuest and Dark Ages of Camelot be upset that there was nothing to kill? In many ways, the release of the final boxed version of The Sims Online would be anticlimactic. The play test would be the real test of consumer acceptance. Everything was on the line.

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