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BananaBananas10's avatar
BananaBananas10
5 years ago

EA Sims 3 Mac issues and terrible response from contact EA!!!!

My 15 year old Daughter bought Sims 3 to play on her Macbook Air on 27 December, paid for out of her pocket money. Nowhere on the site did it mention that Sims 3 would not run on a Macbook Air. She has since raised four separate cases with EA help - none of which have resolved the issues.  Eventually she didn't know what else to do and asked me (her dad) to get involved. I raised the issue today with contact EA and was told that Sims 3 would not run on a Macbook Air.  Great.  So I asked if EA could either refund my daughter her money or swap to Sims 4 (which they seemed to think would work). No. Apparently the "policy" is that they will only give refunds within 4 month's of purchase (even though she tried repeatedly to solve the issue). So EA's position is that despite them not stating at the outset that the software would not run on a macbook Air and willingly selling her the software, then causing her aggravation trying to resolve the issue, they now won't give her a refund even though they know she could never use the software!!!!! I wanted to escalate the issue but was told the only way to do so was to raise it on this open forum - so here I am!

Am I missing something or is this really the way a massive $$$ software corporation should be responding to one of its young customers over a few bucks computer game? 

mac
technical issues

2 Replies

  • VeroniqueBellam's avatar
    VeroniqueBellam
    5 years ago

    Well, the good news is that EA is currently working on updating the Sims 3 so that it is 64-bit and Metal-compatible. So, it should (theoretically) be able to work if:

    1. Her MacBook Air is newer than mid 2012
    2. You have a version of MacOS that is compatible with Metal (Apple's new graphics engine).

    The bad news is that there is no official timeframe when this should be released. I'm not thrilled about that uncertainty either, but if you can't get a refund, then at least take heart that it's currently being worked on. Which isn't bad for a game that's over a decade old.

    The lesson that we should all take from this is "No Half Measures". I mean, sure, Apple does change up a few things that do wind up... killing older apps. The latest update of MacOS killed support for 32-bit apps. Hell, the next one might kill support for games that are running on OpenGL and not Metal. They've done this before, with removing Rosetta (which removed support for Mac apps created before they started using Intel chipsets) and Classic Mode. But The Sims 3 is... special. You see, it uses this third party library called Cider and, well, it is awful. In fact, it could be blamed for why The Sims 3 can't even use all the memory on your computer (which is actually a problem). The Maxis team took a half measure here, and as a result, they created a less stable game that was less capable to stand the test of time.

    That's why it's taking so much longer to update it.

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