🛒 Will you purchase Marketplace content ?

No, no, and hell no. I already resented the Kits for being an even worse cash grab than Stuff Packs, but the Marketplace is just shameful. Hell, even with normal microtransactions, games typically offer a way to get the in-game currency by playing. The Marketplace just requires you to purchase the in-game currency with real dollars so there's an additional layer of separation to keep you from realizing how much money you're spending on a teeny tiny amount of worthless cosmetic items. 

It's yet another way for them to give you less while charging you more.

Absolutely. Effing. Shameless.

As a console player I have to say I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get the free country kitchen kit they're giving away in the market place at the moment, clicked on it and it was there in my game straight away, no watching the download in the notification panel on my ps4. But as for actually purchasing moola and spending it on maker packs it's not something I'll ever do. Not that I'm against the whole concept, I'm just not interested in what's on offer and I'd rather spend £6 on a stuff pack when they're on sale and get some new gameplay elements than spend £5 on a few clothing items or pieces of furniture. I mean it could be worse, Destiny 2 for example sells transmog armor sets for silver that cost about £20 in total and that's just for five pieces of cosmetics. If you already own every piece of content for the sims I can see the appeal of the marketplace, especially if you're a console player and it means you can now get some CC in your game, but for me personally I only buy what interests me and there's plenty of packs/EPs for the sims that I'll never buy cause they're just not my playstyle. I do find it sad seeing how games have become over the years and how they deconstruct games to sell things as 'DLC' it never used to be like that, but games were never 'forever games' you played it, completed it and moved onto playing something else. If anything marketplaces, battle passes, season passes and playing on FOMO is what's wrecking the gaming industry and feeding the monster. Unfortunately these elements seem to be here to stay so we can either engage with them or not, it's completely up to the individual 🙂

Right now the Marketplace is a flea market where customers can get random stuff that nobody would buy usually at the shopping mall (TS3 Store).

There are lots of players who don't use CC/mods - for all kinds of reasons -and console players have never had that option. For those players the Marketplace is a convenient and safe place to find new decor objects. Are they "new" gameplay objects? No. But, most CC is not "new" in that sense either.

The effort CC makers put into their objects is real and not trivial. Why not let them earn a little money? One could argue six ways to Sunday about the reasonableness/fairness of the moola system, but in the end if the "Makers" don't feel it's worth while they'll drop out. 

Millions of Simmers load their games up with all sorts of CC. It's a huge ecosystem. The Marketplace is just another entry into that space. 

Guess we all made our feelings on that known pretty loudly.

Don't forget in the 85 million of players, 50 million of them came when TS4 became Free-to-enter meaning they are players who didn't spend money in the game.

As recent players they don't own everything yet ($1572.91) :

• For $5 they will probably prefer to get a kit with 25 items instead of a maker pack with less than 15 items.
• For $10 Stuff Pack with 60 items + gameplay is also more interesting than less 30 items from maker packs.
• For $20, Game Pack with 150 items + gameplay is better than less 60 items from maker packs
• For $40, Expansion  Pack with 300 items + gameplay + world, maker packs can't compete with less than 120 items.

And I don't talk about the Publisher Sale where these players can get way more content than the Marketplace for the same price.

Maker Packs are in direct competition with paid content (EA packs) and free content (CC and Mods for PC/Mac players), the makers should be more creative to give something special and unique convincing more players to buy their products.

 The "Collectors" who own everything aren't the majority of the community.

At the end of the day, EA is still a company who's number one goal is to make money. 95% of companies are very cash grabby nowadays to make some extra money. EA is basically just following almost every other live service game that has some kind of cosmetic store and that's totally what the Marketplace is. Realistically I think people need to look at it from another perspective in the sense that if we are truly getting no more stuff packs, game packs or expansion packs and we are just going to get mostly updates from now on. It's essentially what people online have been asking for. For them to stop releasing packs and start focusing on fixing the game, which from what I can see is what they are trying to do right now with these patches we are getting. There are a lot of bugs that seem to be much harder than other bugs to work out a fix for (photos turning black) but at least now they can focus more of the team on getting the game to a better standard. I guess I've been pretty lucky in my game that I avoid getting a lot of the major issues. I also stay away from using mods or CC as mods can be just as game breaking as some of the bugs in the game.

Hopefully you'll see a Maker Pack you like one day and I hope you can find uses for some of the items. I don't think the Markerplace is 100% unfair to creators that sign up to the Maker Program as they are very aware of what they are signing up for when they apply to be a part of the program. Yes I think they deserve a bigger cut of the sales of their Maker Packs but they knowingly signed up to the program knowing they were only getting a 30% cut.

100% agree 

This is an interesting point actually. I saw a lot of backlash when the idea was first introduced but now there doesn’t seem to be much, you must be right.
Maybe my expectations were too high, or theres nothing suited to me just yet. Hopefully I’ll find some that I like soon. 

I’m glad you’re enjoying the packs. I agree some of the items are cute. However my main observation is that there’s nothing in the packs that I feel like I really need or want, because it’s quite similar to items I already own from different packs. Maybe my expections were too high seeing the range of cc content already available. It just feels a little low effort so far imo.