Some Thoughts on the Future of ‘The Sims’ Franchise

I have been playing The Sims since a few of my gaming friends were talking about the release of Sims 3 and trusting their judgement, I picked up the game and was hooked ever since. The Sims 3 eventually became The Sims 4 and eventually I found myself wondering how long I had left with The Sims 4 until The Sims 5 dropped. A few years ago when Project Rene was announced, players assumed this was the inevitable The Sims 5. Apparently it’s not, and Project Rene will be an online multiplayer off-shoot. The Sims 4 will continue to get updates and new content including “Creator Packs” which will allow some members of The Sims community to sell content via the Store. There’s been some mixed thoughts on this among the fanbase, but overall I’m leaning towards the positive on this after considering a few things:

Why Has The Sims 4 had such a long life?

Previous editions of The Sims had about a five year time span before they were overhauled. Each addition got more expansions than the previous with The Sims getting seven, The Sims 2 getting eight, and The Sims 3 getting eleven. The Sims 2 started the rise of “stuff packs” and the Store that would expand in The Sims 3. With The Sims 3 additional “Worlds” were also eventually available via the Store. The Sims 4 took this to another level yet with sixteen expansions as well as game packs, stuff packs, and kits. More content definitely added to the lifespan.

Lower gameplay requirements also helped. I think my laptop ended up with two upgrades in order to play The Sims 3 through to the end. The PC I got around the release of The Sims 4 gave me nearly ten years and a lot of expansions before it started to show signs of struggles and by that point even EA was releasing an update to help with that. This certainly didn’t hurt in making the game more accessible when you didn’t need a top of the line machine to play. On the financial end, a few years ago the base game became available for free to play, which added to the accessibility in another way.

Social media influencers likely granted a huge boost in interest and involvement. As social media sources like YouTube, Instagram, and even TikTok became more prevalent, fans of the franchise had more and more ways to connect to other fans and becoming a Sims Influencer was more and more of a thing. Tutorial videos, playthroughs, Instagram worthy builds, shorts about the in game shenanigans not only brought in new fans but sort of build that loyalty towards a particular edition of the game.  While games like Animal Crossing stopped releasing new content, The Sims 4 has been regularly dropping content so there always feels like something new to cover.

COVID also helped the franchise. Overall, video game sales went yup during quarantine, EA ran a number of sales on add-ons for the game, and open sandbox games with perfect little worlds (or orchestrated chaos depending on what kind of player you are) were sort of what everyone seemed to want to engage in. Here is a business look at The Sims during COVID, and another writer’s observations. While The Sims 4 was still raking in serious money, there was less of a demand to throw out a new game altogether and more of a drive to let the fandom grow.

Legacy Games Are Not New

There’s been some debate about whether or not The Sims 4 can stand as a “Legacy Game,” but I don’t know that I would bet against it. From a business perspective, The Sims as a franchise has always been about pulling in money with the add-ons. It also has encouraged a huge following of fan creators who have been creating their own mods and custom content to the point it’s a generally accepted part of the game although EA does not provide bug support for mods or custom content. This does not feel too far off from what Minecraft or even Roblox has and you can’t say that people haven’t thrown down money for extras on those games. The difference is The Sims wasn’t at that level in the beginning and it feels a touch weird to think of the fourth installment of a franchise as the legacy game, but what they are doing now and aiming for doesn’t feel so far off from some of the other biggest franchises in the industry either. Giving more officially sanctioned ways for creators to make money off their add-ons is just shifting The Sims closer to these other games.

Starting Over is Hard

Someone who has loyally bought all of the official content had dropped well over $1000 on this game so far. That’s a lot of loyalty, and the more people drop money and the more features they unlock, the harder it gets to go back and start that game all over. I felt it quite a bit when The Sims 4 came out and some of the base features from the previous game were missing (fans were not happy about that). Those features did return via free updates, but as you try to make the base game better at what point do you rework so much that it’s more than you can package in the price point of the base game in an ideal time frame? It’s a careful balancing act that can easily create a lot of unhappy fans. 

Over time, I have honestly gotten rather attached to the households and family legacies I have created and I don’t want to start all over on gen one. I’m not the only one, there’s a lot of fans who have big feelings about starting all of that all over, but getting to add new things feels really fun.

Some of the News Ideas are Really Cool

EA recently sent out a survey that included some features I was really excited about. One was asking about the ability to create new Worlds (yes please, I’m running out of lots!) as well as some possible ideas for future expansions. I will straight up say that a lot of the expansion ideas felt really cool to me and I don’t think I’d be sad to see any of them turn up. One included a dystopian style scenario to play in, and another included some kind of royalty system with political intrigue. For the more mundane there was even things like sleepaway camp for kids, ocean exploration, or even the retro throwback with malls and arcades. If this is what we get by not starting over then sign me up. I’m also curious about how Project Rene will play out. 

The One Condition

My excitement on not shifting to a new game but going legacy is dependent on one big thing though. They do need to make sure that they are keeping the game base running well and addressing bugs as they come up. There have been some recent updates moving in that direction, so if they can keep that steady enough as they add more features and other fun bit to the game, then I’m really excited to see what the future of my game might look like especially if there’s some sort of dystopian royal intrigue going on because The Sims has always had a certain level of craziness to it and the community will have so much fun with some of those choices.