The SimPoint Problem:
One of my favorite things is how broken TheSims3.com is. I’ve never seen a company just give up more than they did with the store. For those of you who don’t know, The Sims 3 store was kind of a big deal during The Sims 3′s conception. The whole entire deal was that there was tons of special content you could ONLY get if you bought it separately. Honestly, it was probably the only time that The Sims ever sold content on an item by item basis, that is to say, you’d pay money for a single item whether it be furniture or clothing.
For those of you who never bought simpoints, you’d either purchase a simpoint card (It was similar to iTunes gift cards) or you’d provide a valid credit card. The simpoints were then used to buy objects. The prices were steep and there was a massive amount of content being released constantly. During the TS3 era, they’d released store content between expansions and stuff packs.
Now, however, the simpoint system is broken so badly that it will literally just give you free money. You can see in this post on ModTheSims that this glitch was widely publicized. The most interesting thing about this glitch is how random it is. Often you’ll just be provided a button that gives you 1000 free simpoints. The photo above is a screenshot of simpoints that I got today. Now, each simpoint is reported to be 10 cents in value. So that means their system is so broken that it’s giving away $10 of content completely free basically at random. However, there are also ways to trigger the store to give you points as well.
Now to give you an idea of how much content exists on The Store, a post on Steam from 2013 calculates that the combined total of the ENTIRE store is supposedly over $74,000 in value.
So is it actually a glitch? If it is, why haven’t they fixed it? If it isn’t, why are they giving away $10 worth of content free constantly?
