So, you told @kaze_____90 that it wouldn't cost much for a big company for them to create a backup service for your library. I work for a non-gaming software company, so let's take a look.
Bearing in mind that garbage in, garbage out, I'll guestimate. I'm not a builder but I do download things off the gallery and occasionally build, so I'll use the size of my tray folder as an average. LilSimsie, James Turner, and Deligracy would use more and lots of users would use less and I don't have the information to do better. My tray folder is 101 MB and lots of people reading this might be laughing maniacally but again, I don't have an average.
According to this article, the Sims for has 33 million players. With my crummy average, that's 3,333,000,000 MB, or 3,254,882.8125 GB.
They would probably use existing cloud storage rather than creating a data farm just to hold user backups. Cloud storage is priced by the GB. I'm assuming you want the fast storage rather than the slow storage, so let's look at that. For cloud provider #1 (last time I mentioned names my post was edited as being "commercial") that's $74,862 a month. For cloud provider #2, that's $488,000 a month, wow. Also that provider looks at read/write operations as part of their pricing and based on this info from EA which shows 11.3 million gallery uploads (or 941,666 per month average) and 201 million gallery downloads (or 16,750,000), more than their standard 100,000 write operations per month. Luckily that only adds a measley $16.56, but it does speak to not getting slower storage. Let's not waste our time on slow storage, shall we?
This doesn't include developer time to probably rewrite the gallery from the ground up to add security. This would distract them from adding features to the base game and creating DLC. Again, I have no visibility into this, but just for kicks and based on an article I googled saying 7 is the perfect team size (garbage in, garbage out) and this Glassdoor page saying that Maxis developers make $108,000-117,000 a year (low confidence, garbage in garbage out) that comes to $757,519 a year, or $63,126 a month.
So low end estimate: $63,126 + $74,862 = $137,988 a month. To start. Eventually they wouldn't need as many developers, but this also doesn't account for gallery usage over time. Would people build more if they knew Maxis was backing up their builds for them?
(Building a data farm would be an even larger proposition, as they would have to purchase a site to house all the storage and hardware for all the storage and people to repair broken hardware and... there's a reason people are using cloud services.)
So in short: You can expect Maxis to spend $137,988 a month to back up your builds for you, or you could back up your PC. There are a wide variety of backup providers, some of which back up your entire documents folder to the cloud, some of which create exact snapshots of your hard drive so you can restore if your hard drive fails (my personal favorite), and I'm sure someone will edit my post as being "commercial" if I link one (I'm not bitter!), but... back up your PC.
No, really. Back up your PC. Not for the Sims, but for everything on your hard drive. Back up your computer.
idk, EA could make a private gallery and put a limit like Google do in Drive, Photos, etc
i don't want/need some massive gallery, i just want a gallery that let me save at least 1 family, my principal creation, that would be enough fr
like i just want to create my avatar/family avatar, because in my case i only take the same sims that i create in the first time and just change de hair/clothes
and as ridiculous as that sounds, creating a private gallery, even a really small one, linked to my EA account would be just perfect
I know someone who worked on iPhoto. They were a full time Apple employee for YEARS doing that. $$$$$ (I didn’t even mention above that probably one of those seven people on the proposed private gallery team would be a team lead and make more money.)
The issue is less that 100 MB is overly generous—it’s ridiculously small—and more that when you have 33 million players/users, it’s going to be huge whether you want it to be or not. Seriously. Scaling for that many users is inherently huge and expensive whether you set a quota or not. (Which they absolutely would.)
Google:
How much a company is worth is typically represented by its market capitalization, or the current stock price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. Electronic Arts net worth as of June 30, 2022 is $34.34B.
i really believe that i'm not asking THAT much, EA also earns a LOT of money with the really expensive DLCs for "The Sims 4", not counting what they receive from their other games like "Simpsons Tapped Out" which guess what? EA saves/upload the cities of ALL users. EA it's a big company with more than 40 games, they receive more than enough money in a ton of ways.
not even talking about "Fifa", that the games are basically identical every year
Have you ever worked for a publicly held company before? Generally speaking, they don’t make financial decisions based on “we’re rich and money is no object!” If you can provide a profit motive for doing this (monthly storage subscription fees?) then maybe, but no, they’re not going to do it out of the kindness of their hearts. That’s just not how publicly held corporations work. People would get fired.
P.S. There’s no call to be rude to people.
Here's my idea. When uploading anything to the gallery, have an option to make it private except to certain people. For example you could lock it to friends only, or have some sort of password lock so that the only ones that can download are those you share the password with. This way if you were trying to share your creations with specific people, you wouldn't have to worry about putting your stuff out there for everyone to see.
Personally I see nothing wrong with what @arumiarch is asking. To me it sounds like they want to share their creations with one specific person, and without others potentially using or stealing their creations. I could be wrong about this, but to my knowledge unless that specific person plays using the same account then they will have to use the gallery to share their creations. They could also potentially take the files straight from their computers and share them that way, but that's only if they play on a computer. So what about people on consoles? As a console player the only way for me to share anything with anyone is to upload it publicly to the gallery, but what if I don't want everyone to see what I've uploaded? Admittedly in my case that won't apply because I have zero friends, but I know it will apply to a lot of people out there that may not want to share their stuff with everyone.
When it comes to wanting to share with specific people and not everyone, then currently I just don't see any options that allow that on the gallery. So I don't think EA needs any sort of separate private gallery, just options to make uploads private.
yes! that's it thank you for understanding me, i don't want nothing super elaborate, i just want to have more control with my creations
