On the 26th February we mentioned that transition of The Sims Online to a free offering called EA-Land. Just over two months later and the announcement has been made of it’s demise as of the 1st August.

The Sims Online was a real ground-breaker in virtual worlds and it’s a further illustration of how difficult it is to find the formula that works best for large numbers of people. We’d love to hear your stories about TSO – will you miss it?

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.