EA Launches Sims Carnival

Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS) today announced the closed beta of The Sims Carnival, their entry into the web-based gaming world, similar to what we have been doing for 6 months with the Meez Games Channel

We will see exactly what the details are when I get a chance to review it, but it looks like they will be offering some ability for users to modify some of the games, in addition to playing them and uploading new ones.  The key question is how they will be sharing revenue with developers (rev split or fixed fee), how restrictive they will be about ads/links, and whether they will closely curate the catalog, as we do at Meez, or let anyone upload any content and "let God sort'em out".

It's another good example of how web-based gaming is becoming the hot sector (along with social gaming and casual MMOs) and how this will open up distribution opportunities for downloadable developers who offer compelling web versions, as I have previously blogged about here.  Every significant consumer media site will have to offer a full web games channel, and we believe a lot of them will work with Meez.