"SoullessDolls;c-16008498" wrote:
:) Target audience and how the game is rated don't have anything to really do with one another in our modern marketplace. It's a numbers game controlled by an organization that consists of a small group of conservative people on Hollywood's payroll. There are all kinds of fascinating documentaries about it on Netflix and beyond.
Hollywood and the gaming industry monopolies (think places Activision with their movie licenses and EA, companies that we know are in it for the money) lobby to get their games and movies placed at a T rating because statics prove that no other age group of people spends money like teenagers. Teenagers are responsible for consuming roughly 30% of their parents expendable income.
If they were really making this game for teenagers, they would do more to include them in the game play. Right now, teens are poorly represented. Even they agreed on that.
Teens don't mind so much to be a little higher in the game than they are in the real world. In their gaming they want to be a few yrs older and dream about living an easy life with partying and dating all the time. This is exactly was TS4 is mostly about.
It is their parents and other adults who still don't like to see their teens as adults and it is also their pareents and other adults who missed the toddlers and thought that the game should be much more about taking care of babies, toddlers and immature teens instead.
Right now, about 40% of gamers are women, and most of them are in their 30s. I don't think this game was made for them. They'd do a better job with weddings and babies. I don't think it was made for males either. Look at their choice of wardrobe and hairstyles!?
It was decades ago that only 40% of the gamers are females. All recent reports say that now females game just as much as males. They just don't play the same games.
Sports games and action games are still completely dominated by males according to all reports. But casual games, dating games, dress up games, Sims games and even farming games too are dominated by female gamers who play such games much more than male gamers do.
It isn't different from other things in our societies. If you are a member of a boxing club then you still won't find many females among its members - and likewise if you are a member of a club for amateur ballet dancers then you will still also find that such a club is very dominated by female members ;)
To tell you the truth, I don't think EA targeted any specific audience. I think they targeted the people that owned Sims 3.
Not at all! If EA had targeted TS4 at the same simmers who loved TS3 then EA wouldn't have made any simplifications but made the game more advanced instead! EA would
never have omitted the open world and toddlers or let babies be confined to their cribs or let teens become as high as adults if this was the case!
So what was EA's ideas about making all those omissions and simplifications? For me to see there is only one possible explanation: EA wanted TS4 to be an easy and attractive games for new simmers which therefore must have mattered much much more to EA than all the TS3 simmers. Why? Because EA knew that the old simmers often stop playing the game anyway and because EA knew that most Sims games are bought by new young simmers who buy a Sims game as their very first big game.
We gave them over 700 USD (if you bought all the worlds and neighborhoods) for a game that worked 10% of the time.
They KNEW we were going to give them nearly 400 USD (what I have spent on Sims 4 w/ all expansions and what not) for less than 25% of the content volume. They KNEW that we (modders and builders) were going to do the work and make the game playable. They EXPECTED us too.
EA only cares if we buy the games. We won't pay EA for bug fixes or the tools which so many simmers here have been asking for. So EA of course doesn't want to make such things more than absolutely necessary.
The did nothing for world building, nothing for stories, they gay you a blank dollhouse and said: Live Life!
In other words, EA's fan base might be predominately veteran Simmers (which is why I think the complaints against this game are louder than any we've ever seen before.)
Yes, this forum is completely dominated by a hundred veteran simmers who think that they are the most important simmers in the world and that EA therefore should just make the game for them. But the game sells in millions of copies and the gigantic silent majority of much other less dedicated simmers therefore means so extremely much more to EA even though none of us veteran simmers like it at all.
