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Multiple 'Sims 4' Veterans Reportedly Fired / Moved to Mobile Teams
- Thread starter Heon
- Start date
lol noooooooo thanks. I can just imagine the moneybags in every EA exec's eyes when they thought up all the ways they could monetize a mobile Sims. Fuck that.
What's the lightning in a bottle allude to?
Isn't the Sims like the GaaS progenitor?
Edit: I guess The Sims Mobile is just doing much better than Sims PC.
Isn't the Sims like the GaaS progenitor?
Edit: I guess The Sims Mobile is just doing much better than Sims PC.
OP
OP
I haven't played the new mobile Sims yet. Does anyone know if it has loot boxes?
Sims fans mourn. EA reports record profits on new Sims Mobile. Something something worst Timeline. Wallow in sadness.
What's interesting is that even when The Sims series was super popular no other company managed to create a solid competitor. There were only weak attempts like The Partners
Sims Mobile probably costs a fraction to make, has a much higher customer reach, and is even easier to monetize. It sucks, but Sims was always a vehicle for microtransactions/DLC, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised.
The Sims PC is actually doing really well, porting it to consoles and releasing it's most popular expansion pack recently, in their Investor report they said they had 35% year on year growth and they mentioned it along FIFA as the main drivers for their really high service earnings. The Sims Mobile only launched really recently.
It's about time for someone to step in and capitalize The Sims genre like some devs did with SimCity, this concept is too good to die like that, there is definitely an audience for those games
Yikes with a name like that it would fail even if it were the best game ever.
Been saying this for years. We need the Sims equivalent of Cities: Skylines.
Something that does something legitimately interesting with the life sim and doesn't just cram it with microtransactions and IKEA products.
Little recap of how EA treated Maxis in 20 years:
- They acquired the company in 1998
- They killed all their other sims games (in the 90s they were making sim games of all sorts, from Sim Tower to Sim Ant) outside The Sims and Simcity.
- They started ruining Simcity (which was one of the best selling PC franchise of all time), by claiming in 2003-04 that Simcity 4 "was too hardcore, too difficult".
- They ruined Spore by turning it into a kids game in 2007.
- They turned Simcity into another kids game with Societies in 2007.
- They started to turn The Sims into a cash grab with the online store in The Sims 3.
- They ruined their attempt to revive Simcity with the 2013 game.
- In the meantime they also destroyed the team, all their best developers (from Will Wright to what then became Journey's creator Robin Hunicke) left the company.
And now they are basically killing The Sims and what remains of Maxis.
- They acquired the company in 1998
- They killed all their other sims games (in the 90s they were making sim games of all sorts, from Sim Tower to Sim Ant) outside The Sims and Simcity.
- They started ruining Simcity (which was one of the best selling PC franchise of all time), by claiming in 2003-04 that Simcity 4 "was too hardcore, too difficult".
- They ruined Spore by turning it into a kids game in 2007.
- They turned Simcity into another kids game with Societies in 2007.
- They started to turn The Sims into a cash grab with the online store in The Sims 3.
- They ruined their attempt to revive Simcity with the 2013 game.
- In the meantime they also destroyed the team, all their best developers (from Will Wright to what then became Journey's creator Robin Hunicke) left the company.
And now they are basically killing The Sims and what remains of Maxis.
To be honest in 2018 it's pretty hard to see the sims as not becoming a GaaS gacha game on mobile. It really needs very little tweaking to get there.
Freaking EA.
They're doing so much to piss me off that's it's almost comical. I finally have a laptop that can run The Sims and they're already thinking "mobile".
They're doing so much to piss me off that's it's almost comical. I finally have a laptop that can run The Sims and they're already thinking "mobile".
For EA maybe but not for Maxis.
The amount of contents there was in the original The Sims or The Sims 2 was incredible, some of these expansions were really 30-40 bucks worthy (The Sims 2 Open For Business for instance), and even the spin-off like The Urbz were really great.
They tried to add microtransactions with the online store in The Sims 3 but it didn't work.
I wish Cities: Skylines is as good as Simcity 4 but it isn't.
It's a whole lot better than SimCity 5 or whatever it's actually called.
Simcity as a franchise died with Simcity 4.
Simcity Societies was a mess: EA wanted this to be a kids game, while Tilted Mill wanted to build a Caesar set in modern times. (which in theory was a very interesting concept)
Simcity 2013 was ruined by EA's plans to make it an online only game: maps were too small, the online infrastructure was terrible and also DRM were annoying af as always from EA, not to mention the game was embarassingly easy.
That decision sums up perfectly EA's biggest problem: Why change things that already work? Instead of listening the feedbacks from the community, EA's way of thinking is always "how can i make more money from that game?", there's no art in what they do, they don't understand how and why people enjoy good videogames.
Cities: Skylines is great and currently the only good option if you want to play a city builder in 2018 (that's why it's so successful, there's no competition) but everyone who is saying that this is the true successor of Simcity and what it used to be, is dead wrong. If you look at the UI of Simcity 4, after 15 years is still far better than Cities Skylines.
I get that it isn't exactly the same as SimCity 4. It's to be expected honestly since there are things that are different between the two. But it's a whole lot better than what EA has been pumping out. And that's what saddens me. I have both S4 and Cities and I love to play both, but it's definitely nice to see Cities continually get support from it's team.
It's what I wish would happen to The Sims 4 and 5 if there ever was going to be one. I want EA to actually care about something more than money, but they never learn. They never learn.
ea made the most profit of any gaming company btw. of little investment too.
greed my children, greed
greed my children, greed
I wonder how long they will drip feed DLC for The Sims 4. They still have the franchise staples like Seasons and University to milk.
At this point I wouldn't even trust EA with The Sims 5. The life sim really needs a new competitor with their own take on the genre. It just sucks that it's apparently too risky/complicated for other studios to attempt.
At this point I wouldn't even trust EA with The Sims 5. The life sim really needs a new competitor with their own take on the genre. It just sucks that it's apparently too risky/complicated for other studios to attempt.
In the grand context it's a nitpick but EA gave Maxis tons of leeway on Spore, Maxis screwed up that game themselves. Source: Soren Johnson and Chris Hecker, both developers on Spore. https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/chris-hecker-part-1
I haven't played it either, but I've read impressions on the subreddit. Basically your standard F2P system with an energy meter and wait timers. No lootboxes, but it does have a variety of in-game currencies and consumables. Expensive furniture packs (which apparently include assets from the mainline game).
The Sims is one my favourite series but the greed shown with it and the cost to acquire the full content in each edition is atrocious. It's sad this is happening but its felt inevitable for a long time.
Chris Hecker doesn't represent Maxis.
He joined the company in 2004 (so he didn't work on any of their previous Sim games), if you remember how the development went he basically was the biggest advocate for turning Spore into a "cute" game instead of being more science related, he thought the initial concept, the character creation, was far too complex, while the veteran devs at Maxis like Will Wright or Ocean Quigley thought this should have been more a sim game as their previous works.
Also part of the reason why Maxis wanted this to be more science related was also because Sim Mars was previously cancelled and Will Wright wanted to include some of the ideas that were in the game in Spore.
EA backed Chris ideas and Maxis then agreed with him because he (and EA) brought the argument that at the time, they didn't exactly know which audience to target for this game.
The guy was then fired in 2007 for calling the Wii a "piece of ****" and merely "two gamecubes stuck together with duct tape" (yes the same guy that wanted Spore to be a kids games hated the most casual console ever).
Maxis/Spore fans obviously noticed that since even in interviews Chris was the guy who was pushing Spore into what it became, and this thread came out
http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/8555.page
As always then Will Wright and Maxis had to defend Chris and EA's decision because "this company own us, and we didn't know which audience to target", which is unfortunately a recurring point in the history of Maxis at EA.
I remember when they had to justify the fact that the promising Simsville was cancelled to focus on the cash cow The Sims Online.
Anyway whoever is to blame for this, the demo shown in 2005-2006 had the potential to be one of the greatest game ever made, and it was far better and far more complex than what the final product ended up being.
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