The Sims Carnival, a games portal based on the succesful Sims franchise now entered open beta. The portal provides authorship tools for casual web games, tools which I have yet to check. The website claims the tools are rather simple to use and that is probably accurate enough, considering the number of games they seem to have just going out of closed beta. The press release also boasts a rather impressive games creation rate, with "nearly 1 in of 4 visitors having created and published games".
Of course, once you filter it down to how many of those games are also finished, playable and fun, the rate drops down a bit but still, they might be on to something here. Unsurprisingly, along with the proprietary toolkit, the portal also encourages flash developers to upload their own creations.
In the future, we'll probably see more and more portals investing in their own SDKs, to facilitate attracting content creators. Why some big portals aren't doing it already is beyond me but I suspect that most of them have something undisclosed in the works.
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