I would just like certain types of content to be confirmed, so that people can be happy knowing it's going to come at some point. Which I know will never happen because of how the privacy works, but that's my feeling as far as long-term goes.
Apart from that, I don't particularly enjoy hearing about content and then waiting for it to come. I've never been the type to pre-order or get hyped (I think I've pre-ordered something for a game once in all the years I've played video games and I regretted it shortly after). For me it's best when it just shows up and then if there's a price tag on it, I can look at reviews and info and decide if I'm interested in it. I don't think I feel this way about every type of product though. I think a lot of it has to do with how often hype trains end in disappointment with video games. And I think it's only gotten worse over the years with all of the speculation culture and endless imagining of what could be. (Not that I have anything inherently against this practice or the people who do it - I just think it's part of the overall picture of hype trains tending to end in disappointment. The most important factor, in my assessment atm, is just studios not delivering something that is as high quality as their marketing... marketing has gotten more and more robust, while numerous studios increasingly struggle with a variety of issues in putting out high quality content on a regular basis, in part I think just because they always have and the models used in the past for making games were not meant to uphold a 'live service' mode of content delivery. The closest to it is online games and there are plenty that have struggled with the buildup of bugs over time and the difficulties of keeping people interested). The sims studio in particular seems to do pretty well at putting out high quality content and I would hope it does since it was doing the "continued DLC for years" thing before a lot of studios were, but it does noticeably struggle with its content being compared to past iterations of the series, as well as the strain of the base game technology they're working off of with all of its flaws and the increasing discontent in video game communities with monetization models that require you to pay on a regular basis, rather than getting a game in its entirety in one go.
I guess this is a lot of words to say that shorter announce to release cycles are probably for the best right now, at least for a game like this, in terms of managing expectations. The downside of course is the silence in-between and, as I understand it, a significant portion of this community is not accustomed to sitting around and waiting with no knowledge of what's coming down the pipeline. Some people just drop off if there's no news for a while, which I'm sure isn't ideal for Maxis.
If the laws were not as they are, I'd probably say the best would be to give as much detail as possible and use that relationship to temper expectations, to buffer against issues like things changing a lot in development. But unfortunately, that's not the world we live in right now.
Then again, I'm no marketing expert. Just someone with some time on his hands, musing about how it all works.
