Did'ya hear the one about TSR?

As of today - they are FREE.

Go read their front page...

Yea, was following the thread over on MTS. I think its a cool thing and I hope it will make things all a bit less acrimonious. Some of those creators over there are very very good.

Good on them. To be honest, I've felt that TSR has gotten better and better as the years have passed. I also think that PSMBD had a lot to do with breaking their subscriber model (I say that as a former TSR subscriber who stopped visiting their site entirely until about a year ago). So kudos to TSR and kudos to MATY for challenging the pay to download model when people like myself were willing to accept it. Kudos to all the talented artists who share for free too! I imagine that their efforts and generosity have also contributed to TSRs new policy.

I use ad-block so I've never seen ads on TSR, but if their new policy attracts better creators then I might subscribe as I did like what I remember of their cart system. I still almost never go there though, so I dunno. Let's see what happens when sims 4 comes out and folks start creating for it... if TSR can rebrand itself as a fan-friendly community then I think it will definitely survive the next generation of simmers and remain a popular site.

Indeed it's a very nice surprise and will be interesting to see what happens. All their TS2 content has already been free for a while and that has been nice. I don't really ever browse TSR itself, but I've gotten some good things from there via google searches for specific items.... like when I suddenly need a shark for Sims 2 and don't know where to look, that sort of thing. Pretty sure the items I've found that way were all previously pay items.

@Klaartje - what do you think of this, noob?

Fine if you're just downloading for fun but not necessarily for fine for sharing as many of their creators only allow their stuff to be uploaded to TSR.

I'm waiting for the download frenzy to be over. But to be honest I have very mixed feelings about this.

TSR used to be free, and hosted lots of fan sites as well back in the sims1 days. They were the go-to site both for good free content, and as a portal to other fan sites (others were WDS, Mall of the Sims and Killer Sims). All that changed when the price model of server sites swapped to cost of bandwidth. Then they continued down the subscriber model and things got out of hand. TSR did some very dodgy things in their latter days and has become more and more dodgy to protect their income. And to be fair to TSR, part of their movement into dodginess was because of the acrimony from MATY. The harder someone is attacked, the harder they will defend.

In the meantime, Server providers in the last few years have swapped from bandwidth back to storage, which has made it cheaper for small fan sites to do their thing, or to go blogging and use download sites so as not to host anything at all, and therefore not to cost anything either.

While I accept that TSR are changing back to the free model, I have to wonder why. There is something that they are not telling us. I doubt that the owner of TSR has had an epiphany. If he has sold TSR that would explain a lot.

But I AM hoping that this movement back to a free model will also include also the cessation of dodgy behaviour. And that makes me see this as a very good thing.

I visited and downloaded a laptop object and their new site model looks like delayed downloading times like 4shared.com and other storage sites. There is no practical reason for delaying downloads and it is meant to be an annoyance to motivate users to pay for no hassle downloading. I don't think this tactic will work for TSR in the long run. As an end-user, if I can't use a site effectively, instead of subscribing to it I just go to better sites. I would guess that more people than not would do the same thing.

TSR is really going to have to rely heavily on must-have content if they are crippling downloading for free users. I don't know if that is even possible considering the high levels of talented creators who post everywhere but TSR.

This is true nanashi - it was one of the first things I noticed - downloading is delayed so they can sell that particular page view with a "guaranteed" view time.

I've always found that site laborious and slow to navigate! Every item seems to be uploaded separately, even if its part of a set, takes forever! I only download from there if I can't find it anywhere else.