"JoAnne65;c-16223042" wrote:
@Erpe If the Store didn't sell enough it must have been the system rather than enything else ;) (not going into that or I might get into trouble) The Sims 3 players I know own about the entire thing. To be honest I think they did make a lot of money with that one (basing that on the very active gifting topics). I don't care how they offer content myself btw; if I'm hooked I buy, if I'm not I don't. I also still think Sims 4 only started selling properly after they had added toddlers and some packs that really mattered. I think 2017 has been a life saving year for them.
I wouldn't want them to create a game similar to Sims 3 (or any other Sims game) by the way. I do feel though there are some basic ingredients any Sims game should have. Customizability, sims with unique characters, life stages with specific features attached to them and replayable things to do with your sims. And the ability to control all your sims all the time darn it :p
I believe that the problem with the store was that stuff was sold as single items. Then simmers will usually only buy a few things that they need for a current project. But many simmers will buy a whole SP just to get the very few things (maybe even only a single item) which they want.
@drake_mccarty I am sure that they tested and experimented with a lot of things in the early development of TS4. But later they decided what to focus on to get sales numbers up and that was happiness, autonomous behavior and partying. With that focus children was less important. So they simplified babies by tying them to their cribs, omitted toddlers and simplified teens by giving them the same height as adults such that most interactions for adults could be reused for teens.
The Sims Freeplay isn’t more simple than TS4 to make just because it is a game for all kinds of mobile devices. In many ways it is even more advanced than TS4 and I am especially impressed by the huge extra things which EA Firemonkeys has released just now for the current huge Christmas event. Wizards, elves, an ice queen, an ice castle and a lot of new interactions are just som of those things.
But the Sims Freeplay and TS4 are hard to compare. Not because they are made for different platforms because that doesn’t really matter. But because they focus on very different things. All the autonomic interactions in TS4 were hard to develop and so demanding that EA had to reduce the sizes of the worlds to make it work without increasing the hardware requirements for the game too much for a game that had very young “teens” as its main target group. The Sims Freeplay on the other hand has less developed characters (even though they have autonomous interactions too - just less advanced). But the Sims Freeplay is a huge game too where we even can visit other cities belonging to other simmers. To make this work our huge game world is devised in many parts which seems quite natural because all the subworlds are made as different islands. But no the Sims Freeplay isn’t more simple. You likely just think this for two reasons:
1. It is a free game (which EA to avoid competition with TS4 doesn’t allow in a PC version too).
2. You have never seen it at the top level (lvl 55) with everything built and the maximal number of playable sims (34 sims) and extra NPCs in the game.
