Yesterday Maxis announced a chat about web hosting on Maxis' servers. The chat was held and a transcript has been posted. It has some interesting things: the hosting features will contain unlimited hosting and webspace. It might also be possible to use a database (Oracle), and scripting (Perl, PHP) will quite likely be available too. The main catch is that the website has to be about one of the Maxis games (e.g. the Sims, SimCity, etc. etc.). Although it wasn't meant for it, the chat also answered questions about The Sims 2, e.g. that there won't be a demo. All that you will be able to download this year will be tools to create custom content. Back to the hosting: it will become available between now and Christmas. There will be another chat with Luc Barthelet around some time next week. To read the whole transcript (which answers many more questions), click here.