Electronic Arts morph The Sims Online into free virtual world offering

EA-Land has been in development for awhile and is now available for people to sign up and previous Sims Online accounts can reactivate for the new world.

There’s been a large expansion of land, as the site itself breathlessly explains:

The Sims Online (TSO) was made of 12 different cities (AlphaVille, Blazing Falls, etc..) and we are moving all of those cities inside EA-Land (this is called ‘the merge’ by the users!). We have a huge new map: it is 100 times bigger than the previous size of any city. We had to add a whole new zoom level to let users see it. The internet is faster now than when TSO was launched, so we have been able to let each house have more simultaneous visitors. A lot of new users are constantly joining us and we expect more.

It’s fair to say that The Sims Online has been in a steady decline for a long time now – whether this change is enough to turn that around is uncertain. I’d love to hear from former TSO users out there: does EA-Land appeal to you?

Thanks to GigaOM and TechCrunch for the heads-up.