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7 years ago
"Cinebar;c-16216882" wrote:"Erpe;c-16216861" wrote:"Cinebar;c-16216839" wrote:"Erpe;c-16216836" wrote:"Cinebar;c-16216819" wrote:"Erpe;c-16216607" wrote:"LeGardePourpre;c-16216601" wrote:"@Erpe;c-16216509" wrote:"@Writin_Reg;c-16216498" wrote:
The Truth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims_(video_game)
Yes. 11.3 million sold copies sold of TS1 while TS2 only sold a little more than half of that.
The truth about The Sims 2 is a lot of copies were illegal copies, it was the era of the digital piracy for the video games, music and movies.
I think that there were more illegal copies of TS1 though.
Still the main customers for both TS1 and TS2 were very young girls who usually didn’t play other games and who usually knew very little about computers. Beside that they wanted everything as soon as it was released. So I think that the Sims games were pirated much less than other games.
I have to disagree with you that The Sims was purchased by very young girls. Will Wright and others have spoken about this, and they did want to market to young teen boys hoping to draw them into simulation games rather than the console games most young teen males at the time were playing.
But they found out it was grown women who were playing The Sims and not young teen girls and or teen boys, the majority of their customers (due to their own internal studies) showed it was women over 20+ and mainly middle aged. So, in the 2001 a middle aged woman would be around 40 considering the life span at that time. Young teen males were never the majority playing their games and neither were younger females.
I don’t know if it was the same in the US because TS1 and TS2 were T rated by the ESRB while they were rated as 7+ in Europe by PEGI. So clearly parents in Europe didn’t mind their children playing the games like the parents in North America likely did.
Yes. Will Wright had wanted to make boys interested in simulation games from the beginning of Maxis in 1987 because that were the only games that Maxis made and girls didn’t play or buy big games in the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore it came as a huge surprise for everybody when TS1 got so unexpectedly high sales numbers and everything showed that it was because girls suddenly had discovered a game that they loved. Will Wright likely had expected the game to be for boys too even though he also considered the name “Dollhouse” for he game. But especially EA hadn’t expected the game to interest girls.
You are still under the belief it was 'girls' who caused The Sims to sell over 3.2 million copies in the USA alone let alone over the 11 million world wide, it was women not girls who played The Sims. And middle age women were their biggest demographic at the time continuing into The Sims 2.
ETA: That is why those who mod and or are still 'here' are a lot older than those who are now playing. People like me and Reg (no offense Reg, I'm happy I/we lived this long, lol) are those middle aged women who know what demographic and those interviews with Will Wright and producers who told us it was middle aged women were their biggest demographic all through the life of The Sims and we continued on with TS2. TS3 picked up younger players because of it's rpg incorporation of titles like WA etc. and the moodlet system, which is more linear and more roll type play like WA but it has always been middle aged women who helped launch The Sims into the multi billion dollar enterprise it is today. It was never teen girls and or teen boys who were footing those bills. Women over 30 were the ones playing these games.
SimGuruDrake still told us that TS4 is targeted mostly at teen girls only 3 months ago and it isn’t rpg at all.
After TS2 the 10 to 14 yrs olds also disappeared from the Danish forums. 2 or 3 of them managed to enter the Sims 3 forum too though. But they told us that they only had succeeded by lying about their age. EA wouldn’t give them access unless they were at least 16 yrs old (and old enough to have their own credit card).
In 2007 there was a Danish article that told us that EA now had sold a million copies of Sims games in Denmark. The article estimated that about 300,000 Danes owned one or more Sims games at the time where TS2 still only had a few EPs. Denmarks
population was about 5.5 million people.
I don’t know which country buys most Sims games because I haven’t been able to get reliable data. But I know that the games are sold in both China and India too and those countries are the most populous in the world. But EA has to my knowledge never said anything about the sales numbers in Asian countries. Read the article on https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ea-china-top-three-markets-105131 though.
I don't know the age group now that spends more money on TS4. I just know for facts it was middle age women who were buying up The Sims and it's packs. And why those of us who seem or are eldery here compared to the rest of you is because we were part of that middle age demographic at the time of release of The Sims. I don't see a lot of teen Youtubers promoting TS4, but I don't look too hard for them, lol, I neve watch Let's Play videos, they hurt my head and make me want to control their games. LOL Seriously, what I see are people over 20+ promoting TS4 on Youtube, so I have no idea why they are still trying to cater to a ten year old in TS4.
There has always been middle aged woman in the Danish forum too and also just a couple of middle aged men. They still are there and now they are dominating the Danish forum. But only because EA chose to make it difficult for younger girls to get into the Sims 3 forum and be old enough to have a credit card. They could get in anyway by lying about their age. But they didn’t like that at all and therefore stopped using the forum.
In the English forums we have never seen all those young girls (10 to 14 yrs old). But the difference was probably the forum rules. EA’s rules for the Danish Sims 2 forum allowed them to tell their exact age. Just not their real names or their private address. Therefore they had the freedom they needed to discuss everything they wanted to. They even made a few agreements about meeting eachother at a certain public place at an agreed time. But in the US forum they have never known if they talked to a person at their own age and they weren’t allowed to tell anything about themselves. Therefore they couldn’t use the US forum in the same way and they therefore stayed away (and they still do).
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