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7 years ago
"icmnfrsh;c-16207428" wrote:
It could be the sales. TS4 might not have done as well in the earlier years, and maybe that factored into the reduction of resources.
I think the slower pace could also be due to growing pains. The Sims 4 is built on top of a new engine after all. And with every piece of content, they need to make sure it integrates into the multitasking and emotion systems, among other things.
I guess I can only speculate as to why we have fewer EPs, and whether they could scale up just like the old days. I just really crave the excitement of novelty. :p Even back in the Sims 2 days when they'd already have a teaser for the next EP included with a newly-released one, which was so exhilarating.
To understand it we have to consider how decisions about such things most likely are taken inside a company such as EA?
Many simmers here seem to think that everything are decided just by the developers who then should be able to do just what they want. But the developers are only specialized in making (a part of) the game. They aren’t either experts in marking nor economy and they aren’t responsible for such things either. So instead it is EA’s top managers who make such decisions. Those top managers decide both the number of expansions, the types of expansions and the budget and the number of employees working on each expansion.
The top managers don’t take such decisions without consulting other people though. They meet with marketing analyzers to discuss sales numbers and marketing strategies and apparently before the development of TS4 those discussions had the result that it might be a good marketing strategy to replace some of the big EPs with smaller expansions and especially SPs. Then I am sure there also were meetings with the executive producer for TS4 and likely also the top game designer participated in those meetings where EA’s top introduced the idea about less big EPs and more smaller and cheaper expansions for TS4. The problem then must have been that if EA mainly only was selling SPs (which seemed to be a better idea than the Sims 3 online store to sell stuff had been) then some simmers likely would stop playing because they would need new gameplay too. So in the discussion the idea of GPs likely came up as some kind of halfprice EPs to be the main expansions to add new gameplay. Beside this they also came up with the idea to add just a minimal amount of new gameplay to the SPs too because that could be a good way of improving their sales numbers. When the meetings ended and nobody had anything to add EA’s top manager then decided that this would be the way to go (and maybe discussed it with other top managers though) before the budgets for the Sims 4 and each of its expansions finally was decided.
The executive producer and the top game designer then just had to make sure that the game and its expansions were made according to EA’s instructions and told the other producers, game designers and developers how to do this.
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