3 days ago I started this thread over on the Mac Discussions forum as the first thread I started broke and an EA web person, if such a thing exists, did bugger all about it. It is now 20 pages long and is full of people complaining that they cannot play their game and pleading for help and acknowledgement from EA. To cut a long story short, it appears that Mac users who have installed OS X Lion and have either the NVIDIA GeForce 9400 or NVIDIA GeForce 320M CANNOT play The Sims 3 at all. It is impossible. The game loads fine, Create-a-Sim works fine, but as soon as they start playing the game it freezes within minutes.
Over 60 people have now posted their specs confirming that their game freezes. That’s 60 people who, apart from the frustration of not being able to play, are not buying content from the online Store and will probably not buy Town Life or any future EPs or SPs. You’re probably thinking that 60 isn’t very many right? Take into account that, at the time of writing, there are 1,174,271 registered users on the official TS3 site, the majority being Windows users. That’s a fraction of the amount of people who have bought the game but not bothered registering it. According to EA, the base game alone sold 1.4 million copies in it’s first week. That’s only the base game IN A WEEK. I’m willing to bet that there are thousands of other Mac users out there who are having this problem and just given up, and that number will rise as more people upgrade to Lion.
You can blame Apple, NVIDIA or EA. But it is in EA’s interests to sort this problem out, they are the only party suffering as the Mac users affected will simply stop buying the games and content and find other games to play.
That 20 page thread I mentioned earlier? Not a single Guru or Moderator has commented on it. I have received nearly 3,000 unique hits to Lion & TS3 related posts on this blog in 10 days. That is a huge amount for a little blog like this and the number is growing by the hour. Those hits are from all over the world with 90% of them coming from Macs.
EA have also now withdrawn official support for the NVIDIA GeForce 9400 card, as per the readme.txt that came with Town Life. If you have this card you’re supported up to Generations but that’s it (and the majority of people unable to play don’t have Town Life so technically they are supported). However it still says that the game requirements are Mac OS X 10.5.7 Leopard or higher on the back of the DVD box, Lion being higher than Leopard (contrary to some EA Live Chat thingies saying that Lion isn’t supported).
Have a look at the thread:
http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/413974.page
Users have been posting their transcripts from EA’s Live Chat and they make for very amusing, if not frustrating, reading. This is my personal favourite:
http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/285/413974.page#5949011
So EA, grow some balls, stop pretending that this isn’t a growing problem, stop sending out contradictory statements via your own representatives, and start trying to remedy the situation, ok?
And this is the opening post on the thread: