This is a good point. After all, even though LEGO is a company which primarily makes products for kids roughly 3 years old to 12 years old, they still do a lot for their adult fans too. They make advanced building kits with thousands of pieces that sell at a price point that only adults and working teens can afford, they sponsor building contests, they support artists who use LEGO bricks as their primary medium. In their LEGO films, they reference classic sets and older LEGO media (like the Gold Ninja joke in the Ninjago movie). They appreciate all of the fans, young and old, who've played with LEGO bricks over the generations, and they try to keep not just the kids and the teens and adults who are still into LEGO, but also older people who may not have touched anything LEGO in 15 or 20 years, but still have fond memories and warm feelings attached to the brand happy.
EA could and should be that way with The Sims: making sure that the game maintains that "T" rating so that kids can still buy it with their birthday money, but also keeping it challenging and exciting for adult fans of the series as well. There are lots of "T"-rated games that have a lot more edge and drama to them than TS4. Many of them are JRPG's, but still. Maintaining the "T" rating and making a game that kids can have fun with doesn't necessarily mean taking the fat out of the biscuit for older players. Most Final Fantasy games have the "T" rating, but also seriously tackle hard subjects like religion, politics, revenge, environmentalism, the value and meaning of life, what it is to be a person, racism, crime, and more. Even after shifting the battle system to "we don't feel like making a proper turn-based system, so let's just slap Kingdom Hearts' combat on it and call it a day," they still aren't afraid to "go there" with the stories. Imagine if Square/SquareEnix had decided, somewhere along the way, to make all FF stories "American Saturday Morning Time Slot Friendly as Recommended By 4Kids Entertainment." The series would have taken a terrible hit.
With a long-running series, you can't forget about your long-time fans. LEGO knows that, SquareEnix knows that...but EA has yet to learn this lesson.
