"drake_mccarty;c-16413484" wrote:
"TheGoodOldGamer;c-16413437" wrote:
"MidnightAura;c-16413427" wrote:
I don’t see this as a time issue. It’s not about that. Ea can swing dlc for a dlc as a normal practice until it’s blue in the face- but it’s not. Some people will accept it, more power to them. The game industry is changing and yes some games choose to do in game purchases etc. But dlc for dlc is a new low. It’s up there with loot boxes and charging for outfits (looking at you Far Cry 5) But at least FC5 has still sold you a full game. The story is still there.
You yourself Writin_Reg acknowledged the games direction was alien to you and completely different and unrecognisable. Until toddlers came out. But I guess that’s where we differ because Toddlers to me were a mere pit stop in the journey - the course the sims 4 has on hadn’t changed. That course is set regardless of what we think. Things being sliced and diced into little pieces and sold back (many times as re colours) is not “just how it is now” across the industry. I assure you it’s not, it’s an exercise in seeing how far they can cross the line before the community wakes up and goes: “Hold up, what’s going on?”
I play so many different types of games, this is the only game that does this to this degree and the only community that say: “That’s bad but I’m buying anyway”
Speaking about Far Cry 5, I've heard you can earn enough in-game money to get most if not all the stuff from the store, which provides an interesting thought. What if just by having the base game of the Sims, your Sims could earn enough money for you to get packs 'for free'? It would obviously have to be a currency other than regular simoleons that wouldn't have money cheats in it or whatever, maybve there would have to be an online check to make sure it's legit (which with the gallery kind of thing, it wouldn't be hard to include anyway)... but it's an interesting idea.
No microtransactions in Sims! Look no further than The Sims Mobile if you want to see what that would be like. Everything you could possibly buy with whatever currency you “earn” would be individually packaged. One shirt, one hair, etc. Those individual assets would be high priced too, well beyond what you can “earn” in a small-medium amount of time. Hence why people spend loads of money on in-game currency.
There is zero need for this setup in a sandbox Sims game.
You can’t really compare an offline game like TS4 with a free-to-play game like the Sims Mobile and to my experience most gamers who play such free games don’t usually buy the extra but expensive stuff. Those games are made such that the extra stuff isn’t core stuff and it isn’t necessary at all because the game companies always want gamers who can’t afford it to keep playing anyway. The reason is that the game companies get just as money from showing adds. (They are paid a certain amount from the advertising companies each time their add has been shown 1,000 times.)
But extra stuff in such games is extremely expensive. In another F2P game that I play I have just finished the Easter event in only one week even though we had two weeks to do it and without buying the special $40 pack that let us get extra items every day. This expensive pack was just for this event and only for lazy gamers who don’t really play all the time anyway and therefore may have needed it. But to buy a two week speedup pack for $40 for a game you don’t really play? No way! And it is the same thing for all the other F2P games I play and have played: They would have become even more expensive for me to play than the complete collection of TS4 packs if I had cared about all that expensive unnecessary stuff that we always are offered once or twice a week. But I don’t! :)
I don’t believe that we will be offered things to buy in the same way for TS4 or TS5 unless TS5 becomes an online multiplayer game too. But even so I don’t think that EA will make it into a F2P game like the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile if it should happen because EA wants to be able to sell this huge number of packs for real money and not just unnecessary extras like in the mobile Sims games.
