Like don't get me wrong, the items look nice and I'm not obligated to buy them. And it's a better brand collab than the SpongeBob kits; or those big headphones; or the makeup company that used the Sims' name to repackage unsold product; or the purse company whose collab just gave us decorative purses and a reskinned, less useful version of the Lovestruck trunk; or the underwear brand; or the Moschino Stuff Pack; or Stefan Cooke; or Star Wars; or Final Fantasy. Like Netflix Bridgeton lines up well with Sims 4 in terms of audience, and the content looks like it was ripped straight from the new Expansion Pack.
That said, with the way this is all presented, I can't help but feel like it's Royalty & Legacy leftovers, resold as product placement in our games at a higher cost. Then we're getting an event now, which usually comes when we get EPs, which feels very suspicious. At this point I'm predisposed to being suspicious of brand collabs, especially since this is, what? The fourth one we got this year? If we count Lo-Fi Girl.
I completely feel this is leftovers from R&L, which grinds my gears as they tried to say/make R&L was a modern royalty pack. When so many of us were asking for Medieval Nobles, Regency/Bridgeton, Rococo or Edwardian/Victorian era—I do not think anyone was really asking for "modern" royalty (felt that was a convenience thing).
So instead of giving era gameplay (replacements for tech, toggle off mobiles, etc.), they said/used "modern", the rumors that this pack was made ultra on the cheap too (lots of reused/recoloured assets), and yet conveniently got a collab within 6 months of R&L—of asked for royalty era themed content.
If the collab didn't fall through, we probably would have gotten these items included in R&L (maybe we were originally going to get these instead of Silver Screen/Tea Time Solarium free kit sets with pre-order).
But I guess there is a chance they knew that a Royalty EP would make easy sales for kits for various royal friendly eras, and they plan to pump out more to help encourage sales of the EP, and the devs managed to hammer out this collab. Maybe by Christmas we will get a Medieval Noble paired kits too. In that sense I won't/don't blame them, it would have been too hard to have a royalty pack with all the era themes that would satisfy us (especially if they tackle other countries/cultural regions and eras too). But if it is only this Bridgerton collab—I find it highly suspect.
Royalty and Legacy came out around the time the new season of Bridgerton came out on Netflix, so you'd think they would have wanted these kits out to coincide with that. So yeah, I think you make a good point about the free kit sets possibly standing in for these. The Bridgerton kits would have made much more sense if they came with early purchases of the pack and coincided with the release of the show.
