After almost 8 years of operation, the FreeSO Server will shut down on Sunday 8th December 2024.

We will host one final week-long event, The FreeSO Finale, featuring returning April Fools pranks and events (and some crazier ideas) before finally shutting the game down on midnight UTC of the 8th of December (9th December 00:00 UTC). There is more information at the end of this post, though another will be made closer to the start date detailing specifics.

This decision has not been taken lightly, and this blog post will explain how it came to be. But first, there is something important you should know about:

 

The Save Date

 

On the night of the 6th December (7th December 00:00 UTC) the server will be taken down temporarily, and all game data will be saved and exported. Some time after the server shuts down for good, this save data will be made available in some form so that players can explore the city offline, to visit properties across the city immortalized forever. See “Shutdown Plans” for more information on what information will be saved, and what properties/data will be omitted.

This is a perfect opportunity to finish off that renovation that you were putting off, revisit and update your property that was last opened a half decade ago, or clean up all the puddles that have been slowly accumulating over these long 8 years. Make it Christmas forever, transform the whole thing into a maze, or go full old school and make a hardcore money/skill lot… the decision is up to you! It’s the ideal moment to show off what you achieved in the game, and how you and your roommates played it.

On the final two days of operation, any changes made to properties WILL NOT be saved, so that we can unleash wilder dev objects and features onto the city as a final celebration.

 

Development and player falloff

 

Over the years, we’ve had dozens of core contributors as part of the FreeSO team. The value of their contributions can’t be overstated: huge collections of custom objects made just for FreeSO, engaging events built to handle hundreds of players, beautiful property designs and non-stop moderation and upkeep for nearly 8 years. Even longer than that, if you count the sandbox servers that built the community before the beta launch in 2017.

People move on, though. Hundreds of active players have come and gone, including core FreeSO staff members and contributors. Very few people have remained since beta began, and our team is now very sparse.

I brought FreeSO and Simitone to life because I wanted to understand more about how my favourite games worked. As I implemented new features, I had a greater understanding of not only how the games functioned, but why they were made that way in the first place. It deepened my connection to them, so things went quickly as I jumped from feature to feature. Eventually, no more mysteries remained, and there was much less motivation to develop as frantically as I had been. Towards 2020, the majority of my time was spent on events and new features, which were more interesting than cleaning up loose ends. I really burned myself out on the events in 2019, they were our biggest yet and we pushed very hard to get them out in time. I imagine the rest of the team felt the same way. It wasn’t really fun anymore, so I started working on other software development projects on the side.

Recently, each time an event comes around for FreeSO, I find it hard to do much of anything for the entire month leading up to it, as I feel like I’m obligated to produce content for the event. When I’m doing something else, I feel bad for putting the event work off, and when I’m trying to do the event work I find it really hard to stay focused, as it feels like I’m forcing myself to do it. Events have proven to be important to encourage players to stick around, but it’s having a really negative effect on both me and the other staff members to continue producing them without actually wanting to. Without events, our shrinking player count would diminish even further, slowly killing the game and piling on the pressure. The project is meant to be a hobby project first and foremost, not an obligation.

Additionally, there is a huge amount of technical debt in FreeSO that has racked up over the years. For a start, it still runs on .NET Framework 4.5, which was published in 2012. Modern .NET is much faster, much more capable, and much more future-proof. However, many libraries FreeSO uses need to be heavily modified or upgraded multiple major versions to gain compatibility with .NET 8. One of these libraries is the core networking library Mina.NET, which has been long abandoned and causes some of our deeper rooted networking reliability and performance issues, so it would need to be entirely replaced. Additionally, content management needs to be entirely rewritten to make memory usage more predictable, as visiting too many lots can leak too much memory and crash the game. Resolving all of this means a lot of work that needs to go into the FreeSO client and server without any interim updates to the game for existing users. It’s a huge investment, and a lot of uninteresting work rewriting code instead of doing something new and fresh.

Users who have been here for years without many updates get frustrated with the game’s lack of progress, and start to take it out on other players, staff members, and just bring negativity to the community as a whole. it’s difficult working on large changes when they can be negatively viewed by players, or disregarded. While not everyone is like this, it creates a horrible atmosphere and causes more people to leave, users and staff alike. This isn’t anyone’s fault, this is actually an observable end result of stagnation in any community, even outside videogames. Like a failing marriage. Okay, maybe not.

People start demanding things that are either impossible due to legal implications, or insurmountable due to lack of developer or artist interest. I can’t ask for more from the people who contributed so much to the game when I can’t give any more myself. While it’s easy to find people who would like to make unique content or develop deeply integrated gameplay features, it’s much harder to find people who can and will make it happen. The intersection of TSO hyperfocus, hobbyist game developer and people willing to do it for free turns out to be very small. If they were around, they’d already be working on FreeSO. They did already work on FreeSO.

Since I stepped away from development in 2020, I’ve maintained that the game should remain online as long as possible so that people can experience the game for themselves, as it’s an important part of video game history, and an experience I don’t think can be found anywhere else. I think we’re approaching “as possible” – the player count has diminished significantly and it’s becoming increasingly hard to play the game the way that you’re meant to. Still an insane run for an extra 8 years of a 2003 MMO that flopped so hard they had to change the name, but perhaps a losing battle from the start.

We’re calling it here because leaving the game with an unplayably low player base for another year or so wouldn’t be fair to everything that has gone into the FreeSO project. It deserves to be remembered for its high points; when the community banded together to meet a crazy goal, showed up to a (huge!) mock award show and led their teams to victory (or near-victory…). I’m hoping that in the final month of the game, and in our final events, you’ll help recreate that feeling one last time.

 

Shutdown Plans

 

The Sims Online shutdown was particularly devastating, as all game data and playability was lost the moment the servers shut down. We aren’t EA, though – unbound by The Sims franchise and fully open source, we can preserve Sunrise Crater so it can always be revisited. All property and person data for the city will be saved on The Save Date (Dec 6th) and released after the final closure date. All sensitive data will be removed, but there should be enough to browse the city and check out, even some historical properties that you might not have been to in years due to absent owners.

The following data will be removed:

• User account sensitive information: email address, authentication, bans, device/network identifiers
• Lot ban/admit lists
• Private messages (“emails”)
• Plugin data for objects that are unreachable, such as signs and card table (Ban All/Admit List set on property, or object not reachable by visitors)
• Election votes and ratings
• Any rule-breaking lots/avatars that might have been missed when the server was active

This information will be released some time after the final closure date. There’s some work that needs to be done to automatically remove the information above, and ideally some way to plug it into the client to explore it yourself.

Finally, a document detailing the server software, related apps and a roadmap for future development will be released for anyone who wishes to tackle it, or simply understand the situation the project is in. I do believe someone out there might be able to do the project justice, but they might not show up for years, or even decades.

 

FAQ

 

Why run the Halloween event and introduce a new object if you’re closing the game?

As I mentioned above, FreeSO’s events are a huge part of its community spirit. I think that the Halloween events are some of our best, so I felt it was appropriate to run it one more time to give people another chance to enjoy themselves, and make it somewhat clear that it was the last time. The “new object”, being the book of hiding, was actually created a few years ago, but never properly released due to development troubles. Making it available ensures that it has a chance to be appreciated and experimented with, as it’s an impressive object with some cool uses.

Despite the decision already being made, it also served as proof for why development has to formally end. I had a lot of trouble forcing myself to program the NPCs and objects for this event, and it stopped me from doing anything else in the entire month of October. I definitely can’t do it again. S1ndle handled nearly all of the event planning and lot design, and the event wouldn’t have been done without him.

Why not just say you’re done with development and just continue running the server?

Saying that there will be no more development/events would immediately slash the player count, which would kill the game faster. Additionally, one of the largest burdens of running the server is moderation, which doesn’t ever go away. Without any moderation, the rules can be broken freely and the game becomes a lot less fair. This has already started happening, as nobody remains with the drive to enforce them.

Running the game events also requires development effort. Game updates are surprisingly manual, NPC programming is literally just programming – I have to make routines for their idle animations and spawning behaviour, and creating new objects for people to win in events takes a lot of investment. Updates need to be prepared and released to trigger a lot of game events and catalog changes. No matter how much of the event is completed by others, I’m the bottleneck that pushes it to the server, administrates and launches it.

Why not hand the game over to someone else? My girlfriend’s uncle’s cat seems interested in hosting…

The operation of FreeSO has always depended on trust. Staff members come from interaction with the core team, and a desire to create and share game content with the community. The core admin team is an extension of this, made up of those I’ve interacted with a lot and trust deeply. This level of trust keeps the game with a consistent vision, operating smoothly and keeps user data safe. I don’t know what someone outside this circle would do with the game data, or the direction of the game, so I couldn’t comfortably hand off Sunrise Crater to a random user. There is a huge amount of responsibility and presence required for hosting a server of this scale. Obviously, none of the internal team want this responsibility either, as we chose to shut down the server.

Additionally, someone else hosting would not solve any problems with content drought, especially if they want to stick to legal avenues (not just ripping content from commercial software or TS1 cc sites), so the game would likely wither and die anyways (see first question’s answer).

Coming out of this server closure, I do have to say that you should be cautious about who you give your information to on the internet. This might not come as easy to anyone used to the current internet where everything takes place on like five social media sites, but anything else is literally the wild west. Some existing private servers were mostly founded by users banned from FreeSO for extremely inflammatory behaviour towards other players. I would not trust them with my first name, let alone anything else. Just make sure you use a unique password, and be careful where you’re typing it (ideally, not in discord).

I’ll pay for the server to remain up!

This has never been an issue. FreeSO is a hobby project and is not sustained by donations; only creative input, moderation and open source development. Server expenses are paid out of pocket and honestly weren’t much of a concern.

Was this a snap decision?

A lot of these issues have existed since 2020, most notably my absence outside of game events. The plan was finalized some time in September (it was even teased in the Halloween event image), though you can see from us missing the AFAs this year that issues go further back than that.

Is EA responsible for this decision in any way?

No. EA took a hands off approach with FreeSO, and I’ve been grateful that they afforded us the opportunity to run the project without opposition.

Why are you stepping down in particular? What will you do now?

I wouldn’t have done this for more than a third of my life if I didn’t love the game. If I had anything left to give, I would be giving it right now. I’ve needed to move on for some time, and to do it I really do need to say 100% that I’m done.

I’m personally going to focus on building a technology base for me to make my own games and experiments that might turn into something greater. It will likely be life simulation related, but not an MMO. If I do anything interesting, I’ll post about it at https://bsky.app/profile/riperiperi.bsky.social , and maybe some other places.

I’m also happy to share any socials for anyone else who was on the team in a future post. I’ll likely release some kind of rundown of all the FreeSO events/objects and who contributed to them, as some great work was done over the years that can’t go unappreciated.

 

A message from Game Admin Véliocasse

 

As lead admin of FreeSO since its creation, I thought it was time to share my own take on the closure. This project has been a huge part of my life for almost a decade, and looking back, it’s impressive how far it’s come. I was here at the start, building up the team, bringing in most of the staff, and making sure things ran smoothly from day one.

Over the years, I’ve worn a lot of hats—organizing events, troubleshooting, managing the team, handling the usual mess that comes with any long-term project. Whether it was planning big community events or taking on day-to-day issues, I was often the one stepping up to make sure things happened. And honestly, that work has been both rewarding and exhausting. Like Rhys, I feel the weight of it. Nearly a decade in, I’m worn out, and as much as I value everything we’ve built here, I feel ready to move on.

To the staff, I want to say thanks. You all brought something unique to FreeSO, and it wouldn’t have been the same without your effort and dedication. Whether it was helping with events, working behind the scenes, or stepping up whenever we needed it, I’m grateful for the part you each played in keeping things going.

So, as we wrap things up, I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. It’s been a long journey, and though it’s time to close this chapter, I look back with a lot of respect for the work we did together.

– Véliocasse / Aquila

 

The FreeSO Finale

 

As I mentioned, I think our events have been the height of the game’s activity and community spirit, so what better way to finish our long saga than host an event to coincide with the ending.

In the final week of the game, starting on Monday December 2nd, the FreeSO Team will run final events daily until the game shuts down. These will include the following:

• Jams vs Money: The ultimate showdown
  • Are jams really the best? One day of non-stop grinding will decide it all.
• Event Lot Tour – see event lots from across the game’s lifespan
  • Mazes and Escape Rooms from these properties will be functional!
• April 1st medley: ALL effects on one day.
  • Some features, such as Direct Control, will be enabled all week.
• The return of M****: One More Platform
  • His city-wide return, followed by a platforming gauntlet that might be even harder than last time…
• PeeSO (yes, it’s back)
• The Save Date: countdown at Sunrise Crater Town Hall
• Post Save: distribution of Forbidden Objects, beginning with a Town Hall event.
  • We will split the atom

…and possibly more. Players can run their own events, and we will leave the true end of the game on the 8th for players to say their own goodbyes in their own way.

More information on the timing of these events will appear in a followup blog post. Just know that everything will happen on the final week – up until then, remodel your property for The Save Date, host your own events with your friends, and generally enjoy the game in its last month.

As a final note, I expect this announcement, and especially the final event to alter the player count significantly. No matter what happens, the server is closing on December 8th.

Thank you all for playing the game for all these years.

– Rhys