EA Stops You Selling The Sims 4 Mods
Modding in the Sims community is practically as important as the vanilla games themselves. It's safe to say that the enduring legacy of The Sims wouldn't amount to much without the passionate and amazing fans that continue to hold it up.
A huge part of the way they experience the ultimate life simulator is the mods that others create to make their games more immersive. After all, if EA isn't going to improve the game's babies, why shouldn't fans who want to have a crack at developing some improvements? EA seems to know it, but it's not exactly keen on anyone making any money from it.
Can You Monetise Mods In The Sims?
Click to enlargeEA has laid out some new rules in a new blog post, which details its refined player policy. In the process, the publisher has made an attempt to make it harder for modders to profit off of their creations when it comes to The Sims.
The post states that the company knows how important the modding community is to the game, yet it's making an effort to make sure that their works aren't to be directly affiliated with EA. The company has added a few details to its terms, asking players that they "do not promote your mods in a way that suggests they are affiliated with The Sims, Maxis, or Electronic Arts."
EA has also insisted that "mods must be non-commercial and distributed free-of-charge. Mods cannot be sold, licensed, or rented for a fee, nor can mods contain features that would support monetary transactions of any type." But, it's not totally drawing a line under modders making money.
Is EA Banning Making Money From Modding?
Thankfully, EA hasn't completely doomed players from making money from their mods - in fact, it's encouraging donations on mod sites. Another addition to the terms reads "The Sims recognizes that creating mods takes time and resources. To recoup these development costs, mod developers may [...] run passive advertisements and requests for donations so long as they are limited to the mod website or distribution site, and do not appear within the mod itself."
Well, it's certainly something, and even though this might put up a few barriers in mod creation, at least EA wasn't as aggressive as it could've been with modding bans. It's hard to trust EA to do the right thing, so this is a very, very small win. And we take those.