How many more years of TS4?

"catitude5;c-16232839" wrote:
I had a thread going about what people would like in Sims5 and they removed it. Why are they so afraid of ideas? I would think that NOW is the time to see what the people want instead of starting it, and finding out the people hate the idea like Sims4 was supposed to be online. No, they don't want our ideas. Just think how much more successful Sims4 could have been had they listened to the players. I agree with candy8, Sims3 was better even with the problems.

They don’t want us to discuss the Sims 5 because the Sims 4 is the current game. Besides that EA isn’t interested in our ideas for the Sims 5 because people here just want it to be an improved version of one of the earlier games while EA instead wants it to be a new and different Sims game based on some completely new idea.

So let us return to the subject of this thread which is to guess about how many years the Sims 4 has yet before EA stops making expansions for it. People seem to just throw out random numbers. So they can say 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, 8 years without giving any reasons at all. But why is this random guessing interesting? I don’t see it.

So let us instead use knowledge about how EA and other game companies decide such things because they don’t just throw a dice to decide how many years each of their games will live. They use reasoning instead!

How has EA’s reasoning worked until now? For the Sims 1 EA got into technical problems because TS1 hadn’t been planned to have many expansions and it was hard for EA to make them such that they were easy to install. EA never really solved that problem and we had to install all the expansions in the correct order or there were no chance that it would work. Therefore EA only let the Sims 1 live in 4 years.

But the Sims 2 and the Sims 3 didn’t have this problem. So EA let them both live in almost exactly 5 years.

But some simmers think that the Sims 4 will live longer because online MMO games like the Sims Freeplay, the SimCity BuildIt and similar games do. Again they ignore the reasoning behind this and EA’s reasons for not letting the earlier big Sims games live longer than at most 5 years. So why not? And why do the game companies let their free-to-play MMO games live longer?

We have to consider the main differences between big offline games and free-to-play MMO games to understand this:
1. The big Sims games get a lot of expansions each year and after 5 years they have so many expansions that sales numbers for new expansions usually went down. The main reason for this is that a lot of new simmers prefer to buy earlier discounted expansions instead of the new full price expansions. But another reason is that more and more simmers stop buying the expansions and maybe also stop playing the game. EA’s only way to avoid this (at least partially) would be not to discount old expansions - but then old expansions wouldn’t really sell at all. So until now EA has always decided to release a new and different basegame with a different focus after (at most) 5 years.
2. Sims Freeplay is now 6 years old and EA releases more and more expensive stuff for the game. All this stuff is sold as ingame purchases and usually only available for a couple of weeks. Then EA offers something else instead. Besides that EA earns money by showing adds from other companies in the game. This game doesn’t have big expansions like the PC game has. So it won’t ever get the same problems. New simmers only see the most recent stuff for the game anyway and if EA stopped supporting the game then the simmers would become very angry because they couldn’t play the game anymore if EA took the server down and they would lose both their ingame friends and all the stuff they had bought. Therefore they likely would switch to the next version of the game anyway. (I also play big free-to-play MMO games from other companies and in one of them the game company just a couple of months ago changed all the graphics in the game and replaced many of the objects with nicer looking objects with the mostly the same way of working. So this is the way to renew such games instead of attempting to force the fans to switch to a new game.)

Therefore I believe that EA will support the Sims Freeplay in several (and maybe many) more years unless people stop playing it and it at some point doesn’t attract new simmers anymore. The same thing will be true for the Sims Mobile and SimCity BuildIt until one of the games fail. But not for the Sims 4 because it still has all those expansions (where half of the EPs compared to the earlier games have been replaced by GPs and more SPs than for any earlier Sims game). That is why I still don’t guess blindly but just expect to EA to release a new basegame after almost exactly 5 years and announce it about 15 months before its release - just like EA now has done for both Sims 2, Sims 3 and Sims 4!