Thinking my biggest concern with this “official” mods business, is how The Sims Team is very intrinsically using the word “safe” in how they describe it, and that's bad... and lemme tell you why...
This is a sentiment they’ve been building for a long time now, and goes as far back as The Sims 2 days, when there were some folks who didn’t download mods or cc from any place that didn’t seem obviously aligned with Maxis or EA ( shit they still do it now, as I recently bumped into a tweet that legit thought the sharing of tray files means it's from a pirated game, and therefore the files are "dangerous" ), hence the rise of sites like The Sims Resource, that I believe at one point even got into trouble for using official logos and marketing material, and generally passing themselves off as an affiliate, while taking people’s money for content, which technically didn’t follow EULA.
However the general distaste some players had for spaces like TSR ( mind you this was in their "members only" era ), and preference for sites like Mod The Sims ( a site made by simmers for simmers that hosted content for free ) inevitably changed the eco system. LJ and forums became havens for a lot of the custom content people put in their games, and also offered a sense of community that TSR couldn’t.
With the release of The Sims 3 came with change however, to how cc was distributed, as much as how players communicated. Many creators migrated from forums to blogspot or tumblr mainly, trading out a community focused platform for one more personal ( similar to LiveJournal ). So many were hosting their own content, their own way on file sharing sites, but with self moderation, unfortunately came the downsides of it.
Though MTS was still quite popular for much of The Sims 3's life span, self moderation had opened the door to self monetization, thus incentivizing creators to move away from sites like MTS, and TSR, and instead adopt ads, and link shorteners like ad-fly. Obviously they didn't garner as much profit as TSR creators, but it was a simple and easy way to generate some kind of money off of their work... problem was... it wasn't safe, and neither was TSR at that point.
When TSR took down their members only model, likely due to pressure from EA and their sudden changes in EULA, they had to find other ways to generate profit, and thus the introduction of ads, so, so many ads... so many that some people complained it would slow down their computers, and some, if clicked on accidently, which tbh wasn't hard with how they were interlaced in seemingly every element on the website, worries of malware and virus began cropping up, by no real surprise, anyone who's grown up during the rise of the internet knows that ads = viruses. This is all just very ingrained in online culture, there's a reason why ad-blockers have been a thing since 4ever.
This didn't seem to stop TSR however, let alone creators who attached their downloads to ad-fly, and therefore once again I bring this conversation around to the word "safe".
I have been around long enough, and in the modding scene long enough to know that mods, no matter where you get them will never be safe. Much of modding was niche and fringe for a lot of gaming history, hence why it was so, and still is predominately overwhelmed by adult/erotic mods... like with pirating games, it's just always had this very, very big stigma around it, and with the recent issue of Patreon creators using manipulation tactics, and data stalking causing such a big kerfuffle in the community, that it got to the likes of EA themselves to finally decide to put their foot down on the whole issue ( and then pull it up idk ??? lol ) it all seems just so very... coincidental to me.
This isn't the first time either, there was the putting viruses in files shared with anti-paywall sites, hall passes written out by "lawyers" to excuse bad behavior, the TSR debacle, the p*do mod debacle, the LoversLab having to scrub their forum of "questionable mods" debacle, the DMCA's, the doxxing, the deleted blogs, the list goes on honestly, it's just been such a mess. Then, while all this was going on, whatever EA offered as a "safe space" for downloading user created content wasn't honestly any better.
The Sims Exchange was a mixed bag, a lotta times you'd download sims or homes with broken or corrupt cc attached, and lord knows what else... people would reupload content by other people without their consent, or even credit, which by no surprise at all ended being the same exact issue that eventually inundated The Sims 4 Gallery, not to mention the comments section being used to harass users.
tldr; modding will never truly be safe, the fact that the word "safe", this rather bold promise coming out of EA's mouth of all companies is even going to be remotely believed, bc some Sims YouTuber says it's also "safe", just really rubs me the wrong way, and says a lot about how true a statement it actually is. They're trying to stigmatize the modding community again... who's trustworthy, and who isn't trustworthy... who's good, and who's evil, and all for their own benefit... bc when the hell has EA ever once done anything, that wasn't mostly for their own benefit?
