"JoAnne65;c-16222689" wrote:
Well, we’ll never know for sure, cause EA will never admit to anything I think ;) The packs they aren’t hurrying, that’s for sure, and I think that’s a good thing.
No we won’t know if we are waiting for an explanation from EA. I completely agree in that.
But I just know how big and successful companies work when they are run by highly educated economists and marketing experts. Don’t think that such a company really gives anything away for nothing or that it cares about us or other people. This is also confirmed by the way that EA always have treated even its own employees. EA is scrupulous when EA closes down whole departments or sacks employees. Also EA has demanded that its developers work up to about a hundred hours a week to be able to finish many games before their deadlines. So when EA cares so extremely little about even its own employees then why should EA care about its customers - except about their money?
All this is the reason why I don’t believe in any explanations about EA just knowing how to make games or what we want because I know that the absolute only thing that interests EA’s top is to get the sales numbers up and the costs down. EA’s top don’t have fixed wages. They are instead basicly paid percentages of EA’s profit. So if EA’s profit is doubled then their yearly income is too. That is the reason why they are so extremely focused on increasing the company’s profit and don’t care at all about anything else.
So why didn’t EA make TS4 more like TS3? I can see the following reasons:
1. If TS4 had been too similar to any of the previous games then EA knows that a lot of simmers likely would have refused to buy it “because we already have this game” and the reviews would also have discussed much more if it really would be worth it to “pay for the same game even once more?” Therefore EA wanted TS4 to be so different from the previous games as possible and yet still to be a Sims game anyway. Also especially the first expansions should have different names and content to avoid this danger.
2. Sales numbers likely showed that cheaper expansions sold better than more expensive expansions. So by replacing half of the EPs with half priced GPs EA solved two problems. (GPs were both cheaper and easier to give new content than a huge number of EPs would have been.)
3. Stuff didn’t sell well enough in the Sims 3 store and experience showed that stuff sell much better if it is collected into SPs.
4. EA had earlier released Sims games without even children for consoles and expansions with nightclubs and similar things had always been popular. So why not let TS4 focus more on partying to make TS4 more different? This would also suit the idea about more autonomous behavior quite well.
But for EA to release TS4 without toddlers and with simplified babies and teens with the plan about changing that a couple of years later would defy all logic and EA wouldn’t have been able to find anything that would indicate that to be a good idea! Therefore I just can’t believe that this possibly could have been EA’s plan. The only logical and possible explanation for the delayed toddlers is that toddlers weren’t planned to ever be released for TS4. But that the missing toddlers seemed to hurt the sales numbers much more than EA ever had anticipated. Therefore EA didn’t see any other way out of those problems except telling the developers to make toddlers anyway and so impressing that the toddlers would be likely to get a lot more customers interested in TS4.
