"Loanet;c-16372710" wrote:
I still don't see Sims 5 coming for years yet. I've looked up news and it's all hearsay at best.
It's all "I heard this" and "Sims games were released about every 4 years in the past so it's sure to be coming out soon." I've searched and there's nothing - NOTHING - even remotely official apart from the vague comments that they haven't written off Sims 5 happening eventually.
Look at https://www.polygon.com/2013/5/6/4305058/the-sims-4-announced and the comments down the page. EA suddenly announced TS4 in May 2013 and told us that TS4 was in development. Then EA released it 16 months later in September 2014. So we usually don’t even know that a new basegame is in development earlier than 15-16 months before it is released even though it has been in development for years. The reason why EA doesn’t want to tell us before that clearly is that in the earlier stages everything can change and EA doesn’t want us to be angry or disappointed when features are changed or removed for the game again later.
Also in both 2012 and in 2013 EA even released 3 big EPs every year - and EA was still able to make TS4 anyway and surprise us by announcing it in May 2013!
Personally I don't think EA will make a Sims 5. Games take about 4 years to make and are expensive - and lately they've been focusing on porting Sims 4 to every other console, so they wouldn't have the inclination to hire a team to work on a whole new Sims 5 when these ports are making them money hand-over-fist. Why rush? EA doesn't NEED to make a Sims 5 game to milk it.
The console game is just a port of the PC game and mainly made in Finland. EA didn’t make it before this option became possible and much cheaper than EA had expected.
Yes EA needs a new basegame because about half of the simmers who bought the Sims 4 basegame back in 2014 most likely don’t play it anymore and EA therefore needs new simmers (mainly the now youngest teens) to start playing too to compensate. But the new young teens are less likely to buy an old basegame and even worse: they will usually prefer to only buy old discounted packs instead of more expensive new ones! So to get sales numbers up to the maximal again EA just badly needs to release a new basegame in 2019. Otherwise sales numbers will just continue to go down even further and become very low in a few years!
Some people make the argument that Sims 5 could take advantage of stronger computers. Well it's weird, but that's actually what Cats&Dogs just did - up the specs significantly so that you need a more powerful computer. MID-GAME. So future packs are already suddenly capable of taking advantage of higher specs.
They'll probably promote a new port and tell us which EP/GP we'll get next with teaser pictures.
I agree that EA doesn’t need a new basegame for newer and stronger computers. But EA still needs a new basegame to get the youngest generations of simmers interested in buying the new packs again too. EA is a company that will do anything to get as high sales numbers as possible to squeeze as much money out of us as possible! So EA will most likely release a new basegame late in 2019 and soon announce it - but let it again be so different from TS4 that as many customers as possible will want to buy both games! (But still make the packs for TS5 small and cheap anyway like EA did for TS4 too.)
