If you’re a fan of life simulation games you’ve probably noticed this by now, but The Sims 4 has been around for a while now. Long Time. The first Sims gave way to The Sims 2 after only four years; The Sims 2 gave way to The Sims 3 after five years; and the gap between The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 was another five years.
But today, The Sims 4 not only celebrates its 10th anniversary, it’s also still in active development: the game’s latest expansion was released just five weeks ago, and EA has announced plans for about a dozen more updates – both free and paid DLC – before the end of 2024.
If you’d told us ten years ago that The Sims 4 would still be the current generation of the series on its 10th anniversary, I doubt many of us would have believed you. Not only was EA’s release cycle for the series already well established by then, but with the best intentions in the world, it’s a strange choice to stop here in The Sims history.
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The game got off to a rocky start with critics and players, likely due to a massive overhaul just 18 months before release that removed key shared features from the 2013 SimCity reboot, which was wildly unpopular. While not a disaster, initial reviews did represent the low point of the series’ slow decline from its heyday, with The Sims and The Sims 2 both averaging scores in the 90s, The Sims 3 dropping a bit, hovering in the 80s, and The Sims 4 averaging a solid but not stellar 70s.
But of course, if you start playing The Sims 4 today, the Sims 4 you download will be very different to the experience you had at launch – even if you ignore a decade of regular paid DLC releases and focus only on the original base game. Despite the increasingly staggering prices of full products, you have to acknowledge that The Sims 4 was the first Sims game to give away anything substantial for free – including the base game itself, which became free on all platforms in 2022 after the game’s eighth anniversary.
As of this writing, 167 base game updates (a little more than one per month since launch) have tweaked and altered the original version to a point where it’s still recognisable as The Sims 4, released in September 2014, but with far greater detail and complexity, and some pretty significant changes to its look and feel.
I think these big changes and the game’s unexpected longevity share a common root cause: the way games are sold, delivered, and monetized has changed significantly over the past decade and a half, and The Sims 4 was the first game in the series to realize that it was entering a market where most players would take it for granted that they would always be connected to the internet. The Sims 3 realized this a few years after its launch, becoming the first game in the series to launch digital-only premium DLC, and the pricing of these add-ons was admittedly a bit excessive. The Sims 4 may have trimmed down the worst excesses—like paying for a $5 haircut with in-game currency converted from real-world money. But it still shows that its creators realize that it exists in an always-online, digital-first ecosystem that is very different from the series’ roots.
Of course, this has its pros and cons. Gone are the days of having to wait six months and pay for another full-priced expansion pack if you wanted the included bug fixed. Final But it also takes some of the pressure off EA to ship something that at least basically works on launch day – and while I do think recency bias can partially explain why The Sims 4’s launch felt worse than previous iterations, I also regret to note that the number of QA teams for The Sims DLC releases has dropped dramatically over the past decade, from dozens per new game to just half a dozen even for full-sized expansions.
If The Sims 4 hadn’t taken advantage of the possibilities offered by live services, it would now feel not only old, but outdated. The ability to modify the base game indefinitely has allowed the developers to turn a game that was fairly by-the-book at launch into the first Sims game to feature gender and sexual orientation customization, as well as cosmetic options that allow for more realistic black hairstyles, vitiligo, and medical wearables, to name just a few examples of the changes that have taken place in Create-A-Sim alone over the past few years.
Even aside from the worthwhile efforts to make this life sim more realistic for everyone, The Sims 4 had some brilliant moments, even if they were often overshadowed by the lackluster reception to the series as a whole. It was the first Sims game to allow upcycling or social media as a career path, for example—a unique reflection on ongoing societal change and shifting priorities over its longer-than-usual lifespan.
On a more abstract level, the recently launched Cupid’s Corner (a Tinder-inspired dating app included in the latest expansion Lovestruck) has been hailed as the series’ best multiplayer yet, as other players’ creations occasionally and unexpectedly appear as potential matches for their Sims. This was a feature that EA didn’t advertise in advance, but most players were pleasantly surprised to find that Captain Jack Sparrow, Shrek, Giant Squidward, and others were looking for love just like everyone else.
When The Sims 5 comes out, it will almost certainly feature multiplayer — likely more like Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ invite-only mode than an MMO. Still, it’s nice to see EA experiment with this non-intrusive mode early, and most Sims 4 players seem to be okay with it.
Sadly, The Sims and The Sims 2 are effectively no longer popular games; while The Sims 3 is still fully supported by EA on digital storefronts, it hasn’t received any content updates since 2014. Project Rene (believed but not technically confirmed to be the long-awaited The Sims 5) has been pretty quiet lately, and while rumors of a secret cancellation may have been exaggerated, there does appear to be quite a bit of turmoil behind the scenes: the departure of long-time The Sims producer and original game director Grant Rodiek in January, and a large leak of early gameplay testing data in the spring.
The Sims 4 has therefore been the face of the series for a full decade now, and that seems unlikely to change any time soon – especially since, by all accounts, The Sims 4 isn’t retiring once The Rene Project is finally released, but is instead planned to continue alongside it in some way. Again, this feels like a missed opportunity for EA to give the most problematic mainline game in the series a rest, put a stop to its consistently uneven reception, and try to move on. But it’s worth remembering that this is still a qualitative assessment, and the 70 million-plus people who have played the game over the past decade tell a different story.
And I remember well that The Sims 3 received a similar level of player opposition during active development, but in hindsight became incredibly popular. I don’t actually think that will happen with The Sims 4, as it was eventually replaced by another game – whether it was Project Rene or a competitor from another studio like inZOI or Paralives. But I would have said the same thing about The Sims 3 a decade ago.
In fact, it’s almost impossible to come to a satisfying conclusion looking back at a game that has never changed and is still constantly changing. The only thing that’s clear at the moment is that we still have a long way to go before we can properly assess the impact that The Sims 4 has had on the series as a whole and its community.
