Those of you that spend even a little of your time playing the hit simulation game The Sims 2 are more than likely aware of custom content (which we will refer to as ‘CC’ from now on) available in all corners of the net.

Custom content can include practically any aspect of the game - even the coding itself. It can be simple additions, like a custom clothing skin designed through a program like Photoshop for your Sim to wear or something as difficult as custom animations and objects. Heck, you can even make your own neighborhood and upload it to the net!

The most widely produced CC would have to be lots and houses, as is obvious when one takes a look at the official Sims 2 exchange website (may I take the time to point out that I’m disappointed EA chose to limit the download speed to close-to-dial-up speeds from their servers). Second would have to be custom clothing skins and then finally - objects.

But enough about that, most of the custom content is freely available on the net. Sites such as modthesims2.com have an absolute wealth of content available, at no charge. These sites rely purely on donations and a light dose of advertisements. Then there are sites which charge you to download content. These come in two types - the sites which have ‘donation packs’ where some content is free to download but you are repeatedly bombarded with ‘Check out our cool donation packs, etc etc”. The donation packs are, however, content which you must pay a set amount for and in other words, pay content. A good example of a site like this is Holy Simoly although I would go as far to say that their free content takes up a fairly large portion of their site and is pretty high quality.

The second type is the ’subscriber sites’. A great example of this is Simslice, a site that’s been around since The Sims 1. These sites charge you a monthly fee in order to access and download their content. In the case of Simslice, they charge you $6.45USD per month in order to be allowed access. And it’s these sites which we, the playerbase, have coined the term ‘paysites’.

Widely disliked and even downright despised by a fair few, paysites are in all manners, in breach of the game’s Term’s of Use which state very clearly that you are not allowed to reap profit over the work of EA and Maxis.

These sites have existed for a long time and there has never been even the slightest hint that legal action may be taken against them - the playerbase as a whole believe that EA does not do so as it realizes that custom content is one of the many reasons so many people choose to continue playing the game; even if they must pay for it.

So no, paysites are not ethical, nor legal. A few folks that have subscribed also find that their content is quite bland, especially in the case of Simslice, as one forum poster on MTS2 chose to state. Their objects more than often are hacked (hacked objects are objects that do something to devalue the play experience, such as an item which can max out all your Sims’ Motives) and contain highly buggy code that you could find easily on a free site.

As a gesture of gratitude for your having read this entry, I’m pleased to be able to give away one of the more popular items from the Simslice site - a hacked one, but fully tested for buggy code. You can download it here. Also, I’d appreciate if you’d leave me a comment - as thanks for the item of course! Or even to give me your own opinion on paysites.

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