How many more years of TS4?

"JoAnne65;c-16234757" wrote:
@Erpe How can I completely ignore a question when nobody asked that question in the first place ;)?

It is the question that I all the time have attempted to answer myself because it to me is the only important question if we want to be able to guess when EA plans to release the next base game :) So I will post the question again: Why has EA until now always released a new basegame after at most 5 years even though simmers always have hated it?

I have no idea about Sims 1 and 2, but I don’t see how they could have dragged on Sims 3 much longer. They added packs to that game like a machine gun at one point and it’s stuffed. Not much room for additions I’d say, if you don’t want your computer to explode. Besides, wasn’t Sims 3 built with an already old engine..? I can imagine that has been one reason for them to develop a new game. I think something similar went for developing Sims 3, the wish to create the game with an open world, which wasn’t possible with Sims 2.

I don’t think that TS3 was built on an old engine. But of course it was built for 2009 computers and in 2014 simmers had better computers. So if EA had wanted to just continue to make expansions for TS3 then EA clearly could have done it.

A problem was the bugs in TS3 though and EA would have had to fix some of those bugs to expand TS3 even more. But the decision about releasing TS4 instead in 2014 had nothing to do with those bugs because it of course was a decision that EA’s top had made several years earlier.

I also don’t believe that the release of TS3 had anything to do with a wish about adding an open world to TS2 because this isn’t the way the top managers in EA thinks. They don’t care much about the content in the game but mainly just about the sales videos and the sales numbers. But when the decision to make TS3 instead of more expansions for TS2 after 2009 then EA’s top manegers knew that TS3 would need something new and impressing in the sales videos or TS3 could easily just become a flop with very low and disappointing sales numbers. So EA’s top likely told the developers to come up with something new and impressing for TS3’s sales videos and I am also sure that they wanted to see what the developers could propose before they gave the developers green light to make it. So EA’s top likely just chose the open world to be the new thing among other things that the developers had proposed as the options for this.

I’m under the impression so far they’ve always wanted to expand the game, renew it, reinvent it. To me Sims 4 feels different. There is nothing actually totally new in there, it just seems to be more simple. And they are adding stuff to it much slower than they ever did before, which indicates they’re not in a hurry (like they clearly were with Sims 3). In fact they’ve stated that the development of Sims 4 is totally different compared to the predecessors, suggesting the game in fact would last much longer than those four/five years.

This is the way that simmers here in the forum usually see it. But believing it requires us to ignore which type of people the top managers in EA is!

One of EA’s former CEO’s came from a company that sold soap and he said that he couldn’t really see the difference between selling soap and selling games. Why not? Because such top managers are just educated in marketing and economy. Their job is mainly only about two things:
1. To improve the marketing by finding better sales slogans and making better sales videos.
2. To improve economy by cutting away all unnecessary expenses but avoid cutting away expenses which actually are important because that could end up as a disaster.

So EA’s top are mainly interested in finding new and impressing sales slogans and sales videos for each new Sims game and to cut down on all unnecessary content that won’t help EA to sell more Sims games anyway. For TS4 the new and impressing thing was chosen to be multitasking and use it to make more impressing sales videos where the sims seemed happier and able to do many more things on their own. Therefore EA told the developers to concentrate on this and not use too much time on babies, toddlers, children and teens who weren’t important for the sales videos anyway. (EA later regretted this a little though when people just went on and on about the missing toddlers and sales numbers began to disappoint. So they ordered the developers to make toddlers anyway and to make the toddlers so impressing that they could repair the sales numbers.)

I think it’s much more effective for them now to really milk Sims 4. To be honest I even wonder if we’ll ever see a Sims 5.

All the signs seem to show the opposite. It isn’t at all like Spore or even SimCity where EA’s top don’t seem to find it worth to make more new games. On the contrary EA has decided to make even more Sims games than ever before. For the first time ever EA now has two Sims games for mobile devices and those games are bigger than ever and gets more and more new stuff released. EA also just recently decided to make TS4 available for consoles too even though EA earlier seemed to have decided not to do this. Besides that EA has expanded the number of GPs from 1 GP each year to 2 GPs each year. So EA actually seems to believe more in the future for Sims games than ever before. Therefore I am quite sure that EA also will release TS5 and most likely by following the same schedule as for the previous games - which means that EA most likely will announce TS5 about May 2018, talk about it on E3 and release it in the second half of 2019.

I just can’t guess what EA’s top has chosen as the main new thing to be used in the sales videos for TS5 (unless it is something about an option to visit cities belonging to other simmers - but that would just be copying the mobile Sims games - so I don’t know).