The main reason Toddlers were released for free was because not everybody buys every game pack, and the game wouldn't work without them because they brought so many changes to the standard Sims' lives - unlike Vampires, which are independent life-states. So EVERYBODY has to have them. They intended to make their money back with packs like Kids' Room (which sky-rocketed in popularity post-toddlers), Parenthood, and Toddler Stuff.
I consider Toddlers as being about the size of a Game Pack, and believe that EA decided at the end of the first year of Sims 4 to put them in, and that was when development began on them.
The main (and only) reason toddlers were released for free was because EA darn well realized that was the right thing to do. They could have made big money with that one (especially considering their quality), but they knew they’d lose every bit of goodwill if they would have done that. Toddlers were in the code from the very beginning, because initially they were meant to be in there, like they should have.
No, actually. Toddlers were released in a patch rather than an EP or a GP because with how the game is built and designed, a new lifestage has to be added via base game. This does not include a whole new life form like pets for example, but with another human form it has to be done through base, otherwise said human form would have to be tied to the DLC that introduced them. That's why in TS2 young adult stage was only available if you decided to go to university - people liked it so much and complained they wanted to play as YAs outside of it too EA took notes and included this lifestage in the base of TS3. If toddlers came with some sort of a DLC they'd have to be tied to a certain world, or they'd come with extremely limited gameplay features (for everybody who's gonna say "but vampires came with a GP and they're not tied to that one pack" - vampires are just a re-skin of the existing lifestages, and thus they work as an DLC addition. If EA decided to add pre teens for example, unless they'd be a re-skin of children, they'd have to patch them in for free. And that's why it's not likely we'll ever get pre teens for TS4)
They simply had no choice and I'm sure this choice was not made last minute. It became clear what they had to do the moment Frank Gibeau decided to scrap the initial version of the game and the team switched to developing it as offline.
A new life stage doesn't have to be tied to a new world or anything. It is actually quite easy to just let it depend on whether you have a certain expansion or not. Then it would work like the following when you decided to age up a baby to the next life stage:
1. If the toddler expansion was installed then the baby would become a toddler.
2. If the toddler expansion wasn't installed the the baby would become a child.
In TS2 the problem was that young adults didn't make any sense outside the university and that the idea was that young adults should age up to adults when they left the university. Therefore they became tied to the university neighborhood.
I don't believe at all that EA could have earned more money by selling the toddlers as an expansion because then people would have become furious and we would have been able to read about "EA's extreme greediness all over the internet" because EA had decided to postpone a whole lifestage like toddlers from its traditional place in the bacegame just to be able to sell it as an EP later. The rage would have made a lot of simmers and other people into deciding to boycott TS4 completely.
So to avoid this EA didn't see any other option except to just release the toddlers for free.
A new life stage doesn't have to be tied to a new world or anything. It is actually quite easy to just let it depend on whether you have a certain expansion or not. Then it would work like the following when you decided to age up a baby to the next life stage:
1. If the toddler expansion was installed then the baby would become a toddler.
2. If the toddler expansion wasn't installed the the baby would become a child.
In TS2 the problem was that young adults didn't make any sense outside the university and that the idea was that young adults should age up to adults when they left the university. Therefore they became tied to the university neighborhood.
I don't believe at all that EA could have earned more money by selling the toddlers as an expansion because then people would have become furious and we would have been able to read about "EA's extreme greediness all over the internet" because EA had decided to postpone a whole lifestage like toddlers from its traditional place in the bacegame just to be able to sell it as an EP later. The rage would have made a lot of simmers and other people into deciding to boycott TS4 completely.
So to avoid this EA didn't see any other option except to just release the toddlers for free.
Theoretically possible, but logistically a pretty poor idea to do. Look at GT and clubs integration. For the most part, they've managed to keep adding activities from stuff to clubs, but sometimes things slip through the cracks. That's the kind of experience you can expect to have had if toddlers was added through a pack; some integration with future content, but with some things slipping through the cracks.
It's also just not a good idea on a business level, considering how popular toddlers are. If toddlers are added through a pack, that means to sell someone on buying (for example) Parenthood or the Toddler SP, you now also have to convince them that it's worth it to buy the pack that adds toddlers as well. Then the marketing could get confusing really fast, too; imagine the marketing for Parenthood if you needed a special toddler pack to use the toddler content in it. "And now here's this clip of a toddler making a mess *which you will only have access to if you purchased the toddler life stage pack." You'd have people going, like, "I bought Parenthood thinking I'd get toddlers, but I now have to buy this other thing too??"
The whole paid pack integration thing in general is a logistical nightmare, they just have to deal with it to a certain degree because regular paid DLC is the model they use to justify developing for the game for so long after release.
Certainly the perceptions about toddlers was likely a motivator (though I don't view it as cynically as you do, I think they genuinely wanted it to be free because they felt that was the right thing to do after missing out on it in base game). But I doubt toddlers would have been paid content, had that factor not existed. The logistics of it are a strong deterrent.
A new life stage doesn't have to be tied to a new world or anything. It is actually quite easy to just let it depend on whether you have a certain expansion or not. Then it would work like the following when you decided to age up a baby to the next life stage:
1. If the toddler expansion was installed then the baby would become a toddler.
2. If the toddler expansion wasn't installed the the baby would become a child.
In TS2 the problem was that young adults didn't make any sense outside the university and that the idea was that young adults should age up to adults when they left the university. Therefore they became tied to the university neighborhood.
I don't believe at all that EA could have earned more money by selling the toddlers as an expansion because then people would have become furious and we would have been able to read about "EA's extreme greediness all over the internet" because EA had decided to postpone a whole lifestage like toddlers from its traditional place in the bacegame just to be able to sell it as an EP later. The rage would have made a lot of simmers and other people into deciding to boycott TS4 completely.
So to avoid this EA didn't see any other option except to just release the toddlers for free.
Theoretically possible, but logistically a pretty poor idea to do. Look at GT and clubs integration. For the most part, they've managed to keep adding activities from stuff to clubs, but sometimes things slip through the cracks. That's the kind of experience you can expect to have had if toddlers was added through a pack; some integration with future content, but with some things slipping through the cracks.
It's also just not a good idea on a business level, considering how popular toddlers are. If toddlers are added through a pack, that means to sell someone on buying (for example) Parenthood or the Toddler SP, you now also have to convince them that it's worth it to buy the pack that adds toddlers as well. Then the marketing could get confusing really fast, too; imagine the marketing for Parenthood if you needed a special toddler pack to use the toddler content in it. "And now here's this clip of a toddler making a mess *which you will only have access to if you purchased the toddler life stage pack." You'd have people going, like, "I bought Parenthood thinking I'd get toddlers, but I now have to buy this other thing too??"
The whole paid pack integration thing in general is a logistical nightmare, they just have to deal with it to a certain degree because regular paid DLC is the model they use to justify developing for the game for so long after release.
Certainly the perceptions about toddlers was likely a motivator (though I don't view it as cynically as you do, I think they genuinely wanted it to be free because they felt that was the right thing to do after missing out on it in base game). But I doubt toddlers would have been paid content, had that factor not existed. The logistics of it are a strong deterrent.
If EA had known how much toddlers meant then of course toddlers would have been in the basegame (or at least released in a free update only one or two months later). But when it took EA 2.5 yrs to release the toddlers then we know that toddlers weren't planned to be released at all the main work on toddlers must have been started some time in the middle of 2016 and although a minor part of the work may have been done already in the basegame before EA decided to drop toddlers it can't have been very much.
But then in 2016 EA clearly changed its mind and ordered the developers to make and release toddlers anyway. EA must also have given the developers a quite big budget for this work because otherwise the toddlers of course would have become much more simplified. EA didn't dare to try to sell toddlers as a GP or EP because people most likely would have become furious as I explained. But then EA clearly decided to profit from the toddlers in other ways and the Toddler Stuff SP and the Parenthood GP I clearly see as results of this way of thinking by EA. Those expansions of course wouldn't have be released at all if the free toddlers hadn't been released first.
That's not specific to a target group. Here's the team size for Mario :
A quick look at TS4 credits will show that there's indeed a lot of developpers in the team. Your speculations about a simplified game or a smaller team just don't match with the facts. And you have brought no proof at all, you just say "it seems to be the case" without any evidence and draw conclusions from that, but take a look at the credits, take a look at the game code, take a look at what game devs are saying about the industry and you'll see that your speculations aren't accurate.
Your earlier statements were about AAA games which clearly have bigger teams and bigger budgets because this is a definition of an AAA game and as I wrote they are mainly action games targeted at hardcore 16-25 yrs old gamers who only buy them if they are better, bigger and more advanced than all the other similar games.
I don't play Mario games. So I have no knowledge about them becoming bigger too.
The credit lists for each Sims 4 game also don't tell us much because of the new structure at Maxis where they apparently move the developers much more around than earlier. So there are likely developers mentioned in those lists who mainly worked at something else but also worked just a little on the expansion where they are listed in the credit list too.
For me it isn't about proving anything. You haven't. But this isn't the point. EA closed down other Maxis studios because they weren't needed anymore when EA now doesn't want to focus much on big EPs anymore because cheap fast-to-make SPs seems to sell much better. To our knowledge EA hasn't expanded the number of employees in the Redwood studio either. Some developers have left while other have been hired to replace them. But we don't know more than this. Only that the Redwood studio also is developing the Sims Mobile and likely also the Sims 5 at the same time as they make a lot of Sims 4 expansions and free updates too. So we know that they have many more teams than earlier. But nothing points in the direction that they have more developers anyway. You are welcome if you somehow can prove this to be the case anyway. But stop referring to the game code and modders who don't know anything about the number of developers either because such information sure isn't in the game code at all.
I'm answering your initial question which was "I still don't understand what people think make TS4 so huge and complicated that the EPs now should take 2 or even 3 times as long time to develop compared to the EPs for TS2 and TS3? Do you really think that TS4 is a that much bigger game?"
You apparently didn't believe that game could be bigger because game developpement costs would be rising and technology is magic. I'm providing sources that developpement costs are indeed rising and technology is not making things simpler. Whether TS4 dev team is bigger or not is beside the point (though modders do have access to a credit list that's far easier to parse than manually counting the name in-game, and the team has former developpers from other Maxis games like Sims Medieval, Spore, Darkspore or Simcity for example). But the game is bigger, like all AAA games regardless of their target group (yes, Mario is bigger too, like Pokemon, or Civilization, or Anno), because that's what people are asking for, they want the next game to be better : have better graphics, better environment, better animations, better gameplay systems, better UI, etc. And yes, it's costly and budgets are skyrocketting in big productions, which is why studios are looking at various ways to reduce their costs like outsourcing for example, because you can't indefinitely increase the number of copies sold.
The main reason Toddlers were released for free was because not everybody buys every game pack, and the game wouldn't work without them because they brought so many changes to the standard Sims' lives - unlike Vampires, which are independent life-states. So EVERYBODY has to have them. They intended to make their money back with packs like Kids' Room (which sky-rocketed in popularity post-toddlers), Parenthood, and Toddler Stuff.
I consider Toddlers as being about the size of a Game Pack, and believe that EA decided at the end of the first year of Sims 4 to put them in, and that was when development began on them.
The main (and only) reason toddlers were released for free was because EA darn well realized that was the right thing to do. They could have made big money with that one (especially considering their quality), but they knew they’d lose every bit of goodwill if they would have done that. Toddlers were in the code from the very beginning, because initially they were meant to be in there, like they should have.
No, actually. Toddlers were released in a patch rather than an EP or a GP because with how the game is built and designed, a new lifestage has to be added via base game. This does not include a whole new life form like pets for example, but with another human form it has to be done through base, otherwise said human form would have to be tied to the DLC that introduced them. That's why in TS2 young adult stage was only available if you decided to go to university - people liked it so much and complained they wanted to play as YAs outside of it too EA took notes and included this lifestage in the base of TS3. If toddlers came with some sort of a DLC they'd have to be tied to a certain world, or they'd come with extremely limited gameplay features (for everybody who's gonna say "but vampires came with a GP and they're not tied to that one pack" - vampires are just a re-skin of the existing lifestages, and thus they work as an DLC addition. If EA decided to add pre teens for example, unless they'd be a re-skin of children, they'd have to patch them in for free. And that's why it's not likely we'll ever get pre teens for TS4)
They simply had no choice and I'm sure this choice was not made last minute. It became clear what they had to do the moment Frank Gibeau decided to scrap the initial version of the game and the team switched to developing it as offline.
Like I said, toddlers were in the code. And a year or so prior to Sims 4's release GuruGrant said in an interview that all life stages would be in. I'm convinced that was the case back then. I believe you when you say they had no choice, I guess I rather meant that it would have been a disgrace if they'd let people pay for them in the first place. But yeah, I think you're right.
Toddlers came as a free patch for engine reasons, but they were made/completed because EA was finally realising that it couldn't continue to treat its customers like plum and still turn a profit.
It was the one single thing most complained about on the board, and now it's the thing that they're most congratulated for. It's such a shame Toddlers weren't there in the first place but it also makes me wonder, would they be this good if they were?
Prepping a list of mods to add after Infants are placed into the game. Because real life isn't 'nice'.
The main reason Toddlers were released for free was because not everybody buys every game pack, and the game wouldn't work without them because they brought so many changes to the standard Sims' lives - unlike Vampires, which are independent life-states. So EVERYBODY has to have them. They intended to make their money back with packs like Kids' Room (which sky-rocketed in popularity post-toddlers), Parenthood, and Toddler Stuff.
I consider Toddlers as being about the size of a Game Pack, and believe that EA decided at the end of the first year of Sims 4 to put them in, and that was when development began on them.
The main (and only) reason toddlers were released for free was because EA darn well realized that was the right thing to do. They could have made big money with that one (especially considering their quality), but they knew they’d lose every bit of goodwill if they would have done that. Toddlers were in the code from the very beginning, because initially they were meant to be in there, like they should have.
No, actually. Toddlers were released in a patch rather than an EP or a GP because with how the game is built and designed, a new lifestage has to be added via base game. This does not include a whole new life form like pets for example, but with another human form it has to be done through base, otherwise said human form would have to be tied to the DLC that introduced them. That's why in TS2 young adult stage was only available if you decided to go to university - people liked it so much and complained they wanted to play as YAs outside of it too EA took notes and included this lifestage in the base of TS3. If toddlers came with some sort of a DLC they'd have to be tied to a certain world, or they'd come with extremely limited gameplay features (for everybody who's gonna say "but vampires came with a GP and they're not tied to that one pack" - vampires are just a re-skin of the existing lifestages, and thus they work as an DLC addition. If EA decided to add pre teens for example, unless they'd be a re-skin of children, they'd have to patch them in for free. And that's why it's not likely we'll ever get pre teens for TS4)
They simply had no choice and I'm sure this choice was not made last minute. It became clear what they had to do the moment Frank Gibeau decided to scrap the initial version of the game and the team switched to developing it as offline.
A new life stage doesn't have to be tied to a new world or anything. It is actually quite easy to just let it depend on whether you have a certain expansion or not. Then it would work like the following when you decided to age up a baby to the next life stage:
1. If the toddler expansion was installed then the baby would become a toddler.
2. If the toddler expansion wasn't installed the the baby would become a child.
In TS2 the problem was that young adults didn't make any sense outside the university and that the idea was that young adults should age up to adults when they left the university. Therefore they became tied to the university neighborhood.
I don't believe at all that EA could have earned more money by selling the toddlers as an expansion because then people would have become furious and we would have been able to read about "EA's extreme greediness all over the internet" because EA had decided to postpone a whole lifestage like toddlers from its traditional place in the bacegame just to be able to sell it as an EP later. The rage would have made a lot of simmers and other people into deciding to boycott TS4 completely.
So to avoid this EA didn't see any other option except to just release the toddlers for free.
Erpe, I always see you boasting about being a former video game design major and yet you talk about games as if messing with their core is as simple as adding a new piece of DLC. It's not as "easy" as you put it, especially in a game like The Sims. That's not even up for discussion.
To add toddlers as an EP instead of adding them as a free update would have been technically very easy. People here just assume that it wasn't because they were seeking for some explanation of the following:
1. Why wasn't the toddlers in the basegame?
2. Why were toddlers delayed for even 2.5 years after the release of the basegame?
3. Why were the toddlers released for free?
So people here try to "reconstruct" answers: 1. Toddlers wasn't in the basegame because they suddenly had become almost impossible to make and the most likely reason was the multitasking.
2. Toddlers were postponed 2.5 years because they had become almost impossible to make.
3. Toddlers were released for free because EA loves simmers and wants to be nice.
But none of this is true. People just guess that it is because they don't understand the game companies, don't understand programming and don't understand the technology, other games or that making and selling games is big business.
I don't pretend to know everything myself either. But I understand at least the fundamentals behind programming and computers from my education as a computer scientist (even though my education is old). I also differ from most simmers because I am not just a simmer but mostly a gamer who have played hundreds of other games too. Therefore I know that TS4 is far from being the most advanced game ever and that things which people declare difficult or impossible here have been made without problems in other games. So the above guesses are wrong - as I explained
FYI: that is not what I said. I said they weren't in the basegame because they decided at some point not to include them. I also said I'm relatively sure that without the immense uproar and general negativity surrounding this game, most emphasised by the lack of toddlers, that they wouldn't have spent any time on bringing them back. Lastly, I said that multitasking does indeed complicate coding things properly for this game & that when they did finally decide to bring them back, yes, it was probably a lot harder than we might realise, given that toddlers had to be noticeably different & more helpless than kids and integrate well with multitasking.
I honestly don't think most people believe EA brought them back because they love simmers. Obviously, as we've told you many times: it was a financial and strategic decision first and foremost. Like all company decisions. If doing what the customer wants serves no financial purpose whatsoever, it is rarely done. But they did realise that if they didn't bring them back or brought them back and made people shell out 20 or 40 bucks for them, it wouldn't matter anymore whether or not they liked us, because it would've broken the last bit of goodwill people had (like someone else has already said).
Don't always put words in people's mouth. And don't always assume you're the only one who understands how development works
To add Toddlers as a paid pack would have been impossible, because it would have broken the game. Why? Because not everybody would have bought it.
Note that Toddlers are an intermediate stage between Baby and Child. What you do as a toddler influences what you do as a child. It directly changes something that is already in base-game. Two versions of Childhood would need to exist - the version for people who had bought Toddlers, and the version for those without. Then two versions of Vampires would need to exist - one for people who had Toddlers (Toddler Vampires) and one for those who didn't. And the list goes on, simply because being able to play a Toddler changes a Sim's entire life.
Unless every single person had Toddlers, Toddlers just couldn't be in the game at all. And the only way to make sure, was if Toddlers was a free patch. You wouldn't have the pack Toddler Stuff, because not every person would have it, and you wouldn't have Parenthood, because most of that involves so much of Toddlers.
The question among EA was, "Do we pay Devs to make this free patch and make back the money on child-based packs? Or do we just ignore everybody who says they miss Toddlers, like the old EA would?"
Prepping a list of mods to add after Infants are placed into the game. Because real life isn't 'nice'.
That's not specific to a target group. Here's the team size for Mario :
A quick look at TS4 credits will show that there's indeed a lot of developpers in the team. Your speculations about a simplified game or a smaller team just don't match with the facts. And you have brought no proof at all, you just say "it seems to be the case" without any evidence and draw conclusions from that, but take a look at the credits, take a look at the game code, take a look at what game devs are saying about the industry and you'll see that your speculations aren't accurate.
Your earlier statements were about AAA games which clearly have bigger teams and bigger budgets because this is a definition of an AAA game and as I wrote they are mainly action games targeted at hardcore 16-25 yrs old gamers who only buy them if they are better, bigger and more advanced than all the other similar games.
I don't play Mario games. So I have no knowledge about them becoming bigger too.
The credit lists for each Sims 4 game also don't tell us much because of the new structure at Maxis where they apparently move the developers much more around than earlier. So there are likely developers mentioned in those lists who mainly worked at something else but also worked just a little on the expansion where they are listed in the credit list too.
For me it isn't about proving anything. You haven't. But this isn't the point. EA closed down other Maxis studios because they weren't needed anymore when EA now doesn't want to focus much on big EPs anymore because cheap fast-to-make SPs seems to sell much better. To our knowledge EA hasn't expanded the number of employees in the Redwood studio either. Some developers have left while other have been hired to replace them. But we don't know more than this. Only that the Redwood studio also is developing the Sims Mobile and likely also the Sims 5 at the same time as they make a lot of Sims 4 expansions and free updates too. So we know that they have many more teams than earlier. But nothing points in the direction that they have more developers anyway. You are welcome if you somehow can prove this to be the case anyway. But stop referring to the game code and modders who don't know anything about the number of developers either because such information sure isn't in the game code at all.
I'm answering your initial question which was "I still don't understand what people think make TS4 so huge and complicated that the EPs now should take 2 or even 3 times as long time to develop compared to the EPs for TS2 and TS3? Do you really think that TS4 is a that much bigger game?"
You apparently didn't believe that game could be bigger because game developpement costs would be rising and technology is magic. I'm providing sources that developpement costs are indeed rising and technology is not making things simpler. Whether TS4 dev team is bigger or not is beside the point (though modders do have access to a credit list that's far easier to parse than manually counting the name in-game, and the team has former developpers from other Maxis games like Sims Medieval, Spore, Darkspore or Simcity for example). But the game is bigger, like all AAA games regardless of their target group (yes, Mario is bigger too, like Pokemon, or Civilization, or Anno), because that's what people are asking for, they want the next game to be better : have better graphics, better environment, better animations, better gameplay systems, better UI, etc. And yes, it's costly and budgets are skyrocketting in big productions, which is why studios are looking at various ways to reduce their costs like outsourcing for example, because you can't indefinitely increase the number of copies sold.
Spore and Darkspore were developed in the studio in Emeryville which was closed in 2015. When that happened EA wrote the the employees would be given a chance in other parts of Maxis or EA. But one of them (Guillaume Pierre) wrote on twitter that it had been fun for 12 yrs. Asked more directly he confirmed that everybody now were without a job. So we don't know if some of them actually became developers for the Sims games or other EA games.
TS4 isn't bigger than TS3 was and it is much more simplified. Therefore I can't see why EA would need more developers for TS4 than for TS3 which had an open world and got much bigger expansions?
You can't convince me by telling me about other games which I don't even know or which I know have become much bigger than they were earlier - because I of course agree that such games that have grown a lot likely have got more developers. But TS4 alas isn't such a game at all. So you need to find something much more convincing to convince me. Also don't look for action games because TS4 isn't such a game anyway. The main reasons that you can't convince me by examples of action games are though:
1. I know that many action games have grown and become much bigger than they were earlier.
2. I don't know more about action games because I don't play them. I am mainly a strategic gamer who usually always avoid both action games and sports games.
The main reason Toddlers were released for free was because not everybody buys every game pack, and the game wouldn't work without them because they brought so many changes to the standard Sims' lives - unlike Vampires, which are independent life-states. So EVERYBODY has to have them. They intended to make their money back with packs like Kids' Room (which sky-rocketed in popularity post-toddlers), Parenthood, and Toddler Stuff.
I consider Toddlers as being about the size of a Game Pack, and believe that EA decided at the end of the first year of Sims 4 to put them in, and that was when development began on them.
The main (and only) reason toddlers were released for free was because EA darn well realized that was the right thing to do. They could have made big money with that one (especially considering their quality), but they knew they’d lose every bit of goodwill if they would have done that. Toddlers were in the code from the very beginning, because initially they were meant to be in there, like they should have.
No, actually. Toddlers were released in a patch rather than an EP or a GP because with how the game is built and designed, a new lifestage has to be added via base game. This does not include a whole new life form like pets for example, but with another human form it has to be done through base, otherwise said human form would have to be tied to the DLC that introduced them. That's why in TS2 young adult stage was only available if you decided to go to university - people liked it so much and complained they wanted to play as YAs outside of it too EA took notes and included this lifestage in the base of TS3. If toddlers came with some sort of a DLC they'd have to be tied to a certain world, or they'd come with extremely limited gameplay features (for everybody who's gonna say "but vampires came with a GP and they're not tied to that one pack" - vampires are just a re-skin of the existing lifestages, and thus they work as an DLC addition. If EA decided to add pre teens for example, unless they'd be a re-skin of children, they'd have to patch them in for free. And that's why it's not likely we'll ever get pre teens for TS4)
They simply had no choice and I'm sure this choice was not made last minute. It became clear what they had to do the moment Frank Gibeau decided to scrap the initial version of the game and the team switched to developing it as offline.
A new life stage doesn't have to be tied to a new world or anything. It is actually quite easy to just let it depend on whether you have a certain expansion or not. Then it would work like the following when you decided to age up a baby to the next life stage:
1. If the toddler expansion was installed then the baby would become a toddler.
2. If the toddler expansion wasn't installed the the baby would become a child.
In TS2 the problem was that young adults didn't make any sense outside the university and that the idea was that young adults should age up to adults when they left the university. Therefore they became tied to the university neighborhood.
I don't believe at all that EA could have earned more money by selling the toddlers as an expansion because then people would have become furious and we would have been able to read about "EA's extreme greediness all over the internet" because EA had decided to postpone a whole lifestage like toddlers from its traditional place in the bacegame just to be able to sell it as an EP later. The rage would have made a lot of simmers and other people into deciding to boycott TS4 completely.
So to avoid this EA didn't see any other option except to just release the toddlers for free.
Erpe, I always see you boasting about being a former video game design major and yet you talk about games as if messing with their core is as simple as adding a new piece of DLC. It's not as "easy" as you put it, especially in a game like The Sims. That's not even up for discussion.
To add toddlers as an EP instead of adding them as a free update would have been technically very easy. People here just assume that it wasn't because they were seeking for some explanation of the following:
1. Why wasn't the toddlers in the basegame?
2. Why were toddlers delayed for even 2.5 years after the release of the basegame?
3. Why were the toddlers released for free?
So people here try to "reconstruct" answers: 1. Toddlers wasn't in the basegame because they suddenly had become almost impossible to make and the most likely reason was the multitasking.
2. Toddlers were postponed 2.5 years because they had become almost impossible to make.
3. Toddlers were released for free because EA loves simmers and wants to be nice.
But none of this is true. People just guess that it is because they don't understand the game companies, don't understand programming and don't understand the technology, other games or that making and selling games is big business.
I don't pretend to know everything myself either. But I understand at least the fundamentals behind programming and computers from my education as a computer scientist (even though my education is old). I also differ from most simmers because I am not just a simmer but mostly a gamer who have played hundreds of other games too. Therefore I know that TS4 is far from being the most advanced game ever and that things which people declare difficult or impossible here have been made without problems in other games. So the above guesses are wrong - as I explained
FYI: that is not what I said. I said they weren't in the basegame because they decided at some point not to include them. I also said I'm relatively sure that without the immense uproar and general negativity surrounding this game, most emphasised by the lack of toddlers, that they wouldn't have spent any time on bringing them back. Lastly, I said that multitasking does indeed complicate coding things properly for this game & that when they did finally decide to bring them back, yes, it was probably a lot harder than we might realise, given that toddlers had to be noticeably different & more helpless than kids and integrate well with multitasking.
I honestly don't think most people believe EA brought them back because they love simmers. Obviously, as we've told you many times: it was a financial and strategic decision first and foremost. Like all company decisions. If doing what the customer wants serves no financial purpose whatsoever, it is rarely done. But they did realise that if they didn't bring them back or brought them back and made people shell out 20 or 40 bucks for them, it wouldn't matter anymore whether or not they liked us, because it would've broken the last bit of goodwill people had (like someone else has already said).
Don't always put words in people's mouth. And don't always assume you're the only one who understands how development works
I wrote about the majority of simmers and not about you
We seem to agree even though most simmers here don't.
I maintain my opinion, repeatedly stated, that EA is a business and seeks to make money, and in a way we should expect certain things from them to try and milk as much money out of us as possible, like separating the Supernatrual lifestates into multiple packs and releasing Stuff Packs thick and fast.
The point is that the way they're making money is by selling entertainment. If they can't make an entertaining product, they've failed.
It's always tough to know whether to blame EA or Devs for something. EA at the top, the budgeteers, are a bunch of suits, and we are supposed to think of the Devs as friendly people who we could sit down with and talk games with, who want to make good games out of the sheer goodness of their heart. It's hard to deny that Devs want to make a product they can be proud of.
However, since EA is a business, the Devs have a limit on what they can do for us. EA budgets them (and their other big boys). They hire and fire, and decide how much to pay them, and give them deadlines. You know why ET the Video Game was so bad? The programmer was budgeted with six weeks to make the game at a time when six months was the norm. "We want this, and this is when we want it done for."
The Devs, on the other hand, are making the product. They can't make if fun and fulfilling if they don't know what we want. And since some of them are into public relations and hang round here most of the day, they SHOULD know what we want. It doesn't benefit anybody if they give us the ability to pick our noses in a Stuff Pack if we're crying out for wicker chairs.
THey've no reason to create a 'fake' event. An event like this takes time to set up. Some of you say "Laundry was bound to win". If it was so very obvious that it would win, and our choices meant nothing at all to progress, why bother with the event at all? Why bother suggesting other kinds of packs that may well be made in the future anyway?
So if a lot of the stuff was rather similar, it means mostly that they're offering us a choice between things they think we'll like.
Prepping a list of mods to add after Infants are placed into the game. Because real life isn't 'nice'.
I maintain my opinion, repeatedly stated, that EA is a business and seeks to make money, and in a way we should expect certain things from them to try and milk as much money out of us as possible, like separating the Supernatrual lifestates into multiple packs and releasing Stuff Packs thick and fast.
The point is that the way they're making money is by selling entertainment. If they can't make an entertaining product, they've failed.
It's always tough to know whether to blame EA or Devs for something. EA at the top, the budgeteers, are a bunch of suits, and we are supposed to think of the Devs as friendly people who we could sit down with and talk games with, who want to make good games out of the sheer goodness of their heart. It's hard to deny that Devs want to make a product they can be proud of.
I mainly agree with about all you wrote here. But the marked statement didn't hit the spot and you will know that if you ever worked for a company which served customers in some way. In such jobs you don't primarily want to satisfy the customers but the company in the sense that if there is a conflict between those two things you will always choose the company. So to be exact: the devs want to satisfy EA many times more than they want to satisfy EA's customers. Why? Because their jobs depends on EA's opinion and not on the opinions from EA's customers. Therefore the devs usually won't try to do things our way unless EA wants them to.
@Erpe alright sorry I thought you meant me @Loanet i agree that they probably wanted to gauge our interest in these other packs but I also believe these were all bound to lose against laundry. I'm not saying they did it necessarily on purpose but it was pretty obvious a feature people have been whining about for ages would more than likely win even if the other features were interesting too. I hope like you say that they're not off the table and make it into a pack some other way but I think without laundry or with laundry being included in every idea anyway the vote would have turned out much differently
That's not specific to a target group. Here's the team size for Mario :
A quick look at TS4 credits will show that there's indeed a lot of developpers in the team. Your speculations about a simplified game or a smaller team just don't match with the facts. And you have brought no proof at all, you just say "it seems to be the case" without any evidence and draw conclusions from that, but take a look at the credits, take a look at the game code, take a look at what game devs are saying about the industry and you'll see that your speculations aren't accurate.
Your earlier statements were about AAA games which clearly have bigger teams and bigger budgets because this is a definition of an AAA game and as I wrote they are mainly action games targeted at hardcore 16-25 yrs old gamers who only buy them if they are better, bigger and more advanced than all the other similar games.
I don't play Mario games. So I have no knowledge about them becoming bigger too.
The credit lists for each Sims 4 game also don't tell us much because of the new structure at Maxis where they apparently move the developers much more around than earlier. So there are likely developers mentioned in those lists who mainly worked at something else but also worked just a little on the expansion where they are listed in the credit list too.
For me it isn't about proving anything. You haven't. But this isn't the point. EA closed down other Maxis studios because they weren't needed anymore when EA now doesn't want to focus much on big EPs anymore because cheap fast-to-make SPs seems to sell much better. To our knowledge EA hasn't expanded the number of employees in the Redwood studio either. Some developers have left while other have been hired to replace them. But we don't know more than this. Only that the Redwood studio also is developing the Sims Mobile and likely also the Sims 5 at the same time as they make a lot of Sims 4 expansions and free updates too. So we know that they have many more teams than earlier. But nothing points in the direction that they have more developers anyway. You are welcome if you somehow can prove this to be the case anyway. But stop referring to the game code and modders who don't know anything about the number of developers either because such information sure isn't in the game code at all.
I'm answering your initial question which was "I still don't understand what people think make TS4 so huge and complicated that the EPs now should take 2 or even 3 times as long time to develop compared to the EPs for TS2 and TS3? Do you really think that TS4 is a that much bigger game?"
You apparently didn't believe that game could be bigger because game developpement costs would be rising and technology is magic. I'm providing sources that developpement costs are indeed rising and technology is not making things simpler. Whether TS4 dev team is bigger or not is beside the point (though modders do have access to a credit list that's far easier to parse than manually counting the name in-game, and the team has former developpers from other Maxis games like Sims Medieval, Spore, Darkspore or Simcity for example). But the game is bigger, like all AAA games regardless of their target group (yes, Mario is bigger too, like Pokemon, or Civilization, or Anno), because that's what people are asking for, they want the next game to be better : have better graphics, better environment, better animations, better gameplay systems, better UI, etc. And yes, it's costly and budgets are skyrocketting in big productions, which is why studios are looking at various ways to reduce their costs like outsourcing for example, because you can't indefinitely increase the number of copies sold.
Spore and Darkspore were developed in the studio in Emeryville which was closed in 2015. When that happened EA wrote the the employees would be given a chance in other parts of Maxis or EA. But one of them (Guillaume Pierre) wrote on twitter that it had been fun for 12 yrs. Asked more directly he confirmed that everybody now were without a job. So we don't know if some of them actually became developers for the Sims games or other EA games.
TS4 isn't bigger than TS3 was and it is much more simplified. Therefore I can't see why EA would need more developers for TS4 than for TS3 which had an open world and got much bigger expansions?
You can't convince me by telling me about other games which I don't even know or which I know have become much bigger than they were earlier - because I of course agree that such games that have grown a lot likely have got more developers. But TS4 alas isn't such a game at all. So you need to find something much more convincing to convince me. Also don't look for action games because TS4 isn't such a game anyway. The main reasons that you can't convince me by examples of action games are though:
1. I know that many action games have grown and become much bigger than they were earlier.
2. I don't know more about action games because I don't play them. I am mainly a strategic gamer who usually always avoid both action games and sports games.
Also, don't forget that with TS3, there was actually more than one team and physical studio involved with its development over time. There was the "main" studio in Redwood Shores that handled much of the primary development along with many of the packs, but there was also a secondary studio in Salt Lake City that also took on some of the development and some packs as well as some of the store content (this was also why we had two expansion packs within a month or so of release, as one pack was developed by the team in Redwood Shores and the other was developed independently by the team in Salt Lake City).
One of the Simgurus had commented much later on in a write-up somewhere that one of the issues that arose from this situation was that it created some problems with the process overall where the game was concerned along with issues involving quality control. For example, when the Supernatural pack was released, we were able to disable many of the non-Sim "character" types that had either previously been introduced into the game or in the pack (or able to make our sims into some of them and that each type had a special frame attached), but we were not able to do so with a new type introduced in a pack released around that same time (I now can't remember what it was, but I do remember many players complaining about that fact around that time) as in developing each pack separately, the team that was working on Supernatural did not have access to what the other team was working on. It also created some other quality control issues as well in having such a setup. In a sense, it was a classic case of where the left hand sometimes didn't know what the right was doing and that had an impact upon the game.
From my understanding, once development for Sims3 officially ended, the team from Salt Lake City was disbanded (I'm not sure how many are still working for EA versus how many were laid off, however) and the same Simguru had commented that in having had that setup, it made for a nightmarish situation in terms of both logistics and the impact it had upon development. Whereas with Sims4, everything is handled by just the one team at Redwood Shores.
@Erpe Are you a Game Critic? like an Art Critic but only for games
we'll give you a full refund. Just make sure you make your request within 24 hours after you first launch the game, within seven days from your date of purchase, or within seven days from the game's release date if you pre-ordered, whichever comes first.
Who said EA doesn't have a sense of humor
That's not specific to a target group. Here's the team size for Mario :
A quick look at TS4 credits will show that there's indeed a lot of developpers in the team. Your speculations about a simplified game or a smaller team just don't match with the facts. And you have brought no proof at all, you just say "it seems to be the case" without any evidence and draw conclusions from that, but take a look at the credits, take a look at the game code, take a look at what game devs are saying about the industry and you'll see that your speculations aren't accurate.
Your earlier statements were about AAA games which clearly have bigger teams and bigger budgets because this is a definition of an AAA game and as I wrote they are mainly action games targeted at hardcore 16-25 yrs old gamers who only buy them if they are better, bigger and more advanced than all the other similar games.
I don't play Mario games. So I have no knowledge about them becoming bigger too.
The credit lists for each Sims 4 game also don't tell us much because of the new structure at Maxis where they apparently move the developers much more around than earlier. So there are likely developers mentioned in those lists who mainly worked at something else but also worked just a little on the expansion where they are listed in the credit list too.
For me it isn't about proving anything. You haven't. But this isn't the point. EA closed down other Maxis studios because they weren't needed anymore when EA now doesn't want to focus much on big EPs anymore because cheap fast-to-make SPs seems to sell much better. To our knowledge EA hasn't expanded the number of employees in the Redwood studio either. Some developers have left while other have been hired to replace them. But we don't know more than this. Only that the Redwood studio also is developing the Sims Mobile and likely also the Sims 5 at the same time as they make a lot of Sims 4 expansions and free updates too. So we know that they have many more teams than earlier. But nothing points in the direction that they have more developers anyway. You are welcome if you somehow can prove this to be the case anyway. But stop referring to the game code and modders who don't know anything about the number of developers either because such information sure isn't in the game code at all.
I'm answering your initial question which was "I still don't understand what people think make TS4 so huge and complicated that the EPs now should take 2 or even 3 times as long time to develop compared to the EPs for TS2 and TS3? Do you really think that TS4 is a that much bigger game?"
You apparently didn't believe that game could be bigger because game developpement costs would be rising and technology is magic. I'm providing sources that developpement costs are indeed rising and technology is not making things simpler. Whether TS4 dev team is bigger or not is beside the point (though modders do have access to a credit list that's far easier to parse than manually counting the name in-game, and the team has former developpers from other Maxis games like Sims Medieval, Spore, Darkspore or Simcity for example). But the game is bigger, like all AAA games regardless of their target group (yes, Mario is bigger too, like Pokemon, or Civilization, or Anno), because that's what people are asking for, they want the next game to be better : have better graphics, better environment, better animations, better gameplay systems, better UI, etc. And yes, it's costly and budgets are skyrocketting in big productions, which is why studios are looking at various ways to reduce their costs like outsourcing for example, because you can't indefinitely increase the number of copies sold.
Spore and Darkspore were developed in the studio in Emeryville which was closed in 2015. When that happened EA wrote the the employees would be given a chance in other parts of Maxis or EA. But one of them (Guillaume Pierre) wrote on twitter that it had been fun for 12 yrs. Asked more directly he confirmed that everybody now were without a job. So we don't know if some of them actually became developers for the Sims games or other EA games.
TS4 isn't bigger than TS3 was and it is much more simplified. Therefore I can't see why EA would need more developers for TS4 than for TS3 which had an open world and got much bigger expansions?
You can't convince me by telling me about other games which I don't even know or which I know have become much bigger than they were earlier - because I of course agree that such games that have grown a lot likely have got more developers. But TS4 alas isn't such a game at all. So you need to find something much more convincing to convince me. Also don't look for action games because TS4 isn't such a game anyway. The main reasons that you can't convince me by examples of action games are though:
1. I know that many action games have grown and become much bigger than they were earlier.
2. I don't know more about action games because I don't play them. I am mainly a strategic gamer who usually always avoid both action games and sports games.
Pokemon, Cilization and Anno aren't action games or sport games, they are respectively RPG, strategy and city building. And you can't seriously claim you're a strategic gamer if you haven't played Civilization. It's THE reference in strategy pc games. You should totally try it if you haven't !
I'm afraid I won't be able to convince you simply because you can't look at games from a developper point of view, which is certainly understandable considering you've never worked as a developper, so you view them from a customer's perspective only. So for you, bigger imply more content or more features (the visible tip of the iceberg) and not the underlying systems. To go from TS2 Bella to TS4 Bella, there's no magical "Improve" button that will do all for you, there's work needed.
We know some devs from Simcity are working on TS4. SimGuruGeorge was producer on Simcity and he's now working on GPs for example.
@Erpe Are you a Game Critic? like an Art Critic but only for games
No. I am just a gamer whith a general interest in games and how and why they are made as they are. I mainly avoid action games and sports games though. Therefore I don't have a console because those types of games are almost the only console games that are made. But I am very interested in strategy games and simulation games both for mobile devices and PCs.
@Erpe Are you a Game Critic? like an Art Critic but only for games
No. I am just a gamer whith a general interest in games and how and why they are made as they are. I mainly avoid action games and sports games though. Therefore I don't have a console because those types of games are almost the only console games that are made. But I am very interested in strategy games and simulation games both for mobile devices and PCs.
Sorry if I am wrong, but I do not see the difference in you and a Game Critic. I do not think any play all game, do they?
Also, I think the developers are learning because we scream loud we stand up and be heard.
we'll give you a full refund. Just make sure you make your request within 24 hours after you first launch the game, within seven days from your date of purchase, or within seven days from the game's release date if you pre-ordered, whichever comes first.
Who said EA doesn't have a sense of humor
I maintain my opinion, repeatedly stated, that EA is a business and seeks to make money, and in a way we should expect certain things from them to try and milk as much money out of us as possible, like separating the Supernatrual lifestates into multiple packs and releasing Stuff Packs thick and fast.
The point is that the way they're making money is by selling entertainment. If they can't make an entertaining product, they've failed.
It's always tough to know whether to blame EA or Devs for something. EA at the top, the budgeteers, are a bunch of suits, and we are supposed to think of the Devs as friendly people who we could sit down with and talk games with, who want to make good games out of the sheer goodness of their heart. It's hard to deny that Devs want to make a product they can be proud of.
I mainly agree with about all you wrote here. But the marked statement didn't hit the spot and you will know that if you ever worked for a company which served customers in some way. In such jobs you don't primarily want to satisfy the customers but the company in the sense that if there is a conflict between those two things you will always choose the company. So to be exact: the devs want to satisfy EA many times more than they want to satisfy EA's customers. Why? Because their jobs depends on EA's opinion and not on the opinions from EA's customers. Therefore the devs usually won't try to do things our way unless EA wants them to.
You're completely right of course, the suits up top also have to be satisfied, which mostly comes in the terms of deadlines and sales figures. It's a quantity or quality thing, in some ways. Devs want to turn out a product they can be proud of, but they also have jobs to keep. After all, if they lose their jobs they won't be able to turn out any product at all.
EA sometimes makes it mightily hard for Devs to turn out a good game. Try GTW. Awesome idea. The trouble is that they had a deadline. So one profession, ironically the profession that has the least depth, got a whole lot more work done on it.
Prepping a list of mods to add after Infants are placed into the game. Because real life isn't 'nice'.
That's not specific to a target group. Here's the team size for Mario :
A quick look at TS4 credits will show that there's indeed a lot of developpers in the team. Your speculations about a simplified game or a smaller team just don't match with the facts. And you have brought no proof at all, you just say "it seems to be the case" without any evidence and draw conclusions from that, but take a look at the credits, take a look at the game code, take a look at what game devs are saying about the industry and you'll see that your speculations aren't accurate.
Your earlier statements were about AAA games which clearly have bigger teams and bigger budgets because this is a definition of an AAA game and as I wrote they are mainly action games targeted at hardcore 16-25 yrs old gamers who only buy them if they are better, bigger and more advanced than all the other similar games.
I don't play Mario games. So I have no knowledge about them becoming bigger too.
The credit lists for each Sims 4 game also don't tell us much because of the new structure at Maxis where they apparently move the developers much more around than earlier. So there are likely developers mentioned in those lists who mainly worked at something else but also worked just a little on the expansion where they are listed in the credit list too.
For me it isn't about proving anything. You haven't. But this isn't the point. EA closed down other Maxis studios because they weren't needed anymore when EA now doesn't want to focus much on big EPs anymore because cheap fast-to-make SPs seems to sell much better. To our knowledge EA hasn't expanded the number of employees in the Redwood studio either. Some developers have left while other have been hired to replace them. But we don't know more than this. Only that the Redwood studio also is developing the Sims Mobile and likely also the Sims 5 at the same time as they make a lot of Sims 4 expansions and free updates too. So we know that they have many more teams than earlier. But nothing points in the direction that they have more developers anyway. You are welcome if you somehow can prove this to be the case anyway. But stop referring to the game code and modders who don't know anything about the number of developers either because such information sure isn't in the game code at all.
I'm answering your initial question which was "I still don't understand what people think make TS4 so huge and complicated that the EPs now should take 2 or even 3 times as long time to develop compared to the EPs for TS2 and TS3? Do you really think that TS4 is a that much bigger game?"
You apparently didn't believe that game could be bigger because game developpement costs would be rising and technology is magic. I'm providing sources that developpement costs are indeed rising and technology is not making things simpler. Whether TS4 dev team is bigger or not is beside the point (though modders do have access to a credit list that's far easier to parse than manually counting the name in-game, and the team has former developpers from other Maxis games like Sims Medieval, Spore, Darkspore or Simcity for example). But the game is bigger, like all AAA games regardless of their target group (yes, Mario is bigger too, like Pokemon, or Civilization, or Anno), because that's what people are asking for, they want the next game to be better : have better graphics, better environment, better animations, better gameplay systems, better UI, etc. And yes, it's costly and budgets are skyrocketting in big productions, which is why studios are looking at various ways to reduce their costs like outsourcing for example, because you can't indefinitely increase the number of copies sold.
Spore and Darkspore were developed in the studio in Emeryville which was closed in 2015. When that happened EA wrote the the employees would be given a chance in other parts of Maxis or EA. But one of them (Guillaume Pierre) wrote on twitter that it had been fun for 12 yrs. Asked more directly he confirmed that everybody now were without a job. So we don't know if some of them actually became developers for the Sims games or other EA games.
TS4 isn't bigger than TS3 was and it is much more simplified. Therefore I can't see why EA would need more developers for TS4 than for TS3 which had an open world and got much bigger expansions?
You can't convince me by telling me about other games which I don't even know or which I know have become much bigger than they were earlier - because I of course agree that such games that have grown a lot likely have got more developers. But TS4 alas isn't such a game at all. So you need to find something much more convincing to convince me. Also don't look for action games because TS4 isn't such a game anyway. The main reasons that you can't convince me by examples of action games are though:
1. I know that many action games have grown and become much bigger than they were earlier.
2. I don't know more about action games because I don't play them. I am mainly a strategic gamer who usually always avoid both action games and sports games.
Pokemon, Cilization and Anno aren't action games or sport games, they are respectively RPG, strategy and city building. And you can't seriously claim you're a strategic gamer if you haven't played Civilization. It's THE reference in strategy pc games. You should totally try it if you haven't !
I know. Civilization 1 was once my favorite game which I played all the time. I also played Civilization 2, 3 and 4. But I never got the same feeling as with the first game. I have played Anno too. But not Pokémon which I don't think is a game for me.
I'm afraid I won't be able to convince you simply because you can't look at games from a developper point of view, which is certainly understandable considering you've never worked as a developper, so you view them from a customer's perspective only. So for you, bigger imply more content or more features (the visible tip of the iceberg) and not the underlying systems. To go from TS2 Bella to TS4 Bella, there's no magical "Improve" button that will do all for you, there's work needed.
You sure haven't worked as a developer either
I think that the difference between us is that you mainly are a gamer who admires all the moderators because you don't have the knowledge to mod or program yourself. Therefore you seem to think that the modders are almost gods even though most of them are just young people who are interested in learning about games and programming games. Maybe because they dream about becoming game programmers themselves. So they have just installed some modding tools from the internet and use those tools to curiously study the game code to understand just a little about how it is made. Then they feel as big heroes when they also discover how the modding tools can be used to modify the game just a little.
I don't admire them in the same way as you do because I know that I could do the same myself. I am just not interested because prigramming was something I did many years ago in my education to become a computer scientist and which I finally found so boring that I decided to mainly teach students in math instead. Also I don't think that I could make the game much better by modding it anyway and I sure prefer to just play the games instead of using most of my time on modding them. But I understand the young modders who see a future in studying game programming and with a dream about becoming professional game programmers.
We know some devs from Simcity are working on TS4. SimGuruGeorge was producer on Simcity and he's now working on GPs for example.
Yes and we know a couple of other new TS4 as well. But we know equally many earlier TS4 developers who don't work on TS4 anymore.
I maintain my opinion, repeatedly stated, that EA is a business and seeks to make money, and in a way we should expect certain things from them to try and milk as much money out of us as possible, like separating the Supernatrual lifestates into multiple packs and releasing Stuff Packs thick and fast.
The point is that the way they're making money is by selling entertainment. If they can't make an entertaining product, they've failed.
It's always tough to know whether to blame EA or Devs for something. EA at the top, the budgeteers, are a bunch of suits, and we are supposed to think of the Devs as friendly people who we could sit down with and talk games with, who want to make good games out of the sheer goodness of their heart. It's hard to deny that Devs want to make a product they can be proud of.
I mainly agree with about all you wrote here. But the marked statement didn't hit the spot and you will know that if you ever worked for a company which served customers in some way. In such jobs you don't primarily want to satisfy the customers but the company in the sense that if there is a conflict between those two things you will always choose the company. So to be exact: the devs want to satisfy EA many times more than they want to satisfy EA's customers. Why? Because their jobs depends on EA's opinion and not on the opinions from EA's customers. Therefore the devs usually won't try to do things our way unless EA wants them to.
You're completely right of course, the suits up top also have to be satisfied, which mostly comes in the terms of deadlines and sales figures. It's a quantity or quality thing, in some ways. Devs want to turn out a product they can be proud of, but they also have jobs to keep. After all, if they lose their jobs they won't be able to turn out any product at all.
I am sure that EA gives the developers much more instructions on how to make the games and that those instructions are based on feedback from EA's game support and marketing people. We can only guess about the precise instructions. But I am quite sure that they contain the following:
1. The amount of SPs released in each financial year.
2. The amount of GPs released in each financial year.
3. The amount of EPs released in each financial year.
4. The amount of and content of free stuff in updates.
5. The intended target group, simpleness and (low) difficulty of the game and all its expansions.
6. The budgets for all releases.
I am also quite sure that EA is in very regular contact with the executive producer who's responsibility it is to make sure that all EA's instructions are followed and to give feedback to EA.
EA sometimes makes it mightily hard for Devs to turn out a good game. Try GTW. Awesome idea. The trouble is that they had a deadline. So one profession, ironically the profession that has the least depth, got a whole lot more work done on it.
There are other problems too. To me it seems that EA mainly want impressing things that can be shown in videos before each expansion is released but doesn't care much about depth or bugfixing. Likely because the main target group are very young teens who are curious enough to get all the expansions if they look interesting in the videos but who have a lot of other interests too and therefore mainly only play the game shortly after each release of an expansion. Therefore they most often won't even see the problems which can arise if we play the game much longer than such young teens usually will do.
@Erpe Are you a Game Critic? like an Art Critic but only for games
No. I am just a gamer whith a general interest in games and how and why they are made as they are. I mainly avoid action games and sports games though. Therefore I don't have a console because those types of games are almost the only console games that are made. But I am very interested in strategy games and simulation games both for mobile devices and PCs.
Sorry if I am wrong, but I do not see the difference in you and a Game Critic. I do not think any play all game, do they?
I am only a gamer who is interested in games for my own pleasure. So I only study games for two private purposes:
1. To find games that I want to play myself.
2. To be able to more easily predict which way the whole game business is going.
Most people here don't seem to understand this though because they are mainly only interested in the Sims games and their own dreams about them. Therefore there seem to be a lot of wishful thinking in this forum and people quite often even become angry if EA does something else or just if somebody predicts something that they don't want to become true
I think that the difference between us is that you mainly are a gamer who admires all the moderators because you don't have the knowledge to mod or program yourself. Therefore you seem to think that the modders are almost gods even though most of them are just young people who are interested in learning about games and programming games. Maybe because they dream about becoming game programmers themselves. So they have just installed some modding tools from the internet and use those tools to curiously study the game code to understand just a little about how it is made. Then they feel as big heroes when they also discover how the modding tools can be used to modify the game just a little.
I don't admire them in the same way as you do because I know that I could do the same myself. I am just not interested because prigramming was something I did many years ago in my education to become a computer scientist and which I finally found so boring that I decided to mainly teach students in math instead. Also I don't think that I could make the game much better by modding it anyway and I sure prefer to just play the games instead of using most of my time on modding them. But I understand the young modders who see a future in studying game programming and with a dream about becoming professional game programmers.
??? Neia does modding and is quite knowledgeable at it.
Honestly, you sound like you're trying to flip the script because someone accurately pointed out that you aren't well-informed on an experiencing level on the inner workings of developing a video game.
Nobody needs to be a game developer to analyze games themselves, but it certainly makes a difference if you're trying to analyze the capabilities of a dev team.
Also, your view on modding is very strange to me. It's like you're throwing up this straw-man argument that modders think they are amazing, so that you can tear them down. It's just weird. I've been modding obsessively and intensively for over six months now and I can tell you, it's really hard to be egotistical as a modder (at least for me) because for every problem you solve and every question you answer, there's always an endless supply of more problems and issues waiting around the corner to throw up brick walls in your face. Modders can be, at any given time, trying to grasp anything and everything there is to do with making the game and putting it together. Some aspects are harder to mess with, with this game, like UI, but a lot of the game is editable and most paid developers in a large team are going to have specialized roles, so it's like you're going full-on indie, trying to learn everybody's job enough that you can do it in varying degrees, or at least understand how it functions.
There's nothing magical about it. It's just hard, grueling self-teaching that happens to be rewarding and enjoyable enough for some people that they're motivated to put the time in. It's also a decent way of getting game dev experience, so that you can break into the industry, if that's something you're looking to do, since game companies generally want people who are self-starters enough to have made some games themselves in some way.
Comments
1. If the toddler expansion was installed then the baby would become a toddler.
2. If the toddler expansion wasn't installed the the baby would become a child.
In TS2 the problem was that young adults didn't make any sense outside the university and that the idea was that young adults should age up to adults when they left the university. Therefore they became tied to the university neighborhood.
I don't believe at all that EA could have earned more money by selling the toddlers as an expansion because then people would have become furious and we would have been able to read about "EA's extreme greediness all over the internet" because EA had decided to postpone a whole lifestage like toddlers from its traditional place in the bacegame just to be able to sell it as an EP later. The rage would have made a lot of simmers and other people into deciding to boycott TS4 completely.
So to avoid this EA didn't see any other option except to just release the toddlers for free.
It's also just not a good idea on a business level, considering how popular toddlers are. If toddlers are added through a pack, that means to sell someone on buying (for example) Parenthood or the Toddler SP, you now also have to convince them that it's worth it to buy the pack that adds toddlers as well. Then the marketing could get confusing really fast, too; imagine the marketing for Parenthood if you needed a special toddler pack to use the toddler content in it. "And now here's this clip of a toddler making a mess *which you will only have access to if you purchased the toddler life stage pack." You'd have people going, like, "I bought Parenthood thinking I'd get toddlers, but I now have to buy this other thing too??"
The whole paid pack integration thing in general is a logistical nightmare, they just have to deal with it to a certain degree because regular paid DLC is the model they use to justify developing for the game for so long after release.
Certainly the perceptions about toddlers was likely a motivator (though I don't view it as cynically as you do, I think they genuinely wanted it to be free because they felt that was the right thing to do after missing out on it in base game). But I doubt toddlers would have been paid content, had that factor not existed. The logistics of it are a strong deterrent.
But then in 2016 EA clearly changed its mind and ordered the developers to make and release toddlers anyway. EA must also have given the developers a quite big budget for this work because otherwise the toddlers of course would have become much more simplified. EA didn't dare to try to sell toddlers as a GP or EP because people most likely would have become furious as I explained. But then EA clearly decided to profit from the toddlers in other ways and the Toddler Stuff SP and the Parenthood GP I clearly see as results of this way of thinking by EA. Those expansions of course wouldn't have be released at all if the free toddlers hadn't been released first.
I'm answering your initial question which was "I still don't understand what people think make TS4 so huge and complicated that the EPs now should take 2 or even 3 times as long time to develop compared to the EPs for TS2 and TS3? Do you really think that TS4 is a that much bigger game?"
You apparently didn't believe that game could be bigger because game developpement costs would be rising and technology is magic. I'm providing sources that developpement costs are indeed rising and technology is not making things simpler. Whether TS4 dev team is bigger or not is beside the point (though modders do have access to a credit list that's far easier to parse than manually counting the name in-game, and the team has former developpers from other Maxis games like Sims Medieval, Spore, Darkspore or Simcity for example). But the game is bigger, like all AAA games regardless of their target group (yes, Mario is bigger too, like Pokemon, or Civilization, or Anno), because that's what people are asking for, they want the next game to be better : have better graphics, better environment, better animations, better gameplay systems, better UI, etc. And yes, it's costly and budgets are skyrocketting in big productions, which is why studios are looking at various ways to reduce their costs like outsourcing for example, because you can't indefinitely increase the number of copies sold.
It was the one single thing most complained about on the board, and now it's the thing that they're most congratulated for. It's such a shame Toddlers weren't there in the first place but it also makes me wonder, would they be this good if they were?
FYI: that is not what I said. I said they weren't in the basegame because they decided at some point not to include them. I also said I'm relatively sure that without the immense uproar and general negativity surrounding this game, most emphasised by the lack of toddlers, that they wouldn't have spent any time on bringing them back. Lastly, I said that multitasking does indeed complicate coding things properly for this game & that when they did finally decide to bring them back, yes, it was probably a lot harder than we might realise, given that toddlers had to be noticeably different & more helpless than kids and integrate well with multitasking.
I honestly don't think most people believe EA brought them back because they love simmers. Obviously, as we've told you many times: it was a financial and strategic decision first and foremost. Like all company decisions. If doing what the customer wants serves no financial purpose whatsoever, it is rarely done. But they did realise that if they didn't bring them back or brought them back and made people shell out 20 or 40 bucks for them, it wouldn't matter anymore whether or not they liked us, because it would've broken the last bit of goodwill people had (like someone else has already said).
Don't always put words in people's mouth. And don't always assume you're the only one who understands how development works
Note that Toddlers are an intermediate stage between Baby and Child. What you do as a toddler influences what you do as a child. It directly changes something that is already in base-game. Two versions of Childhood would need to exist - the version for people who had bought Toddlers, and the version for those without. Then two versions of Vampires would need to exist - one for people who had Toddlers (Toddler Vampires) and one for those who didn't. And the list goes on, simply because being able to play a Toddler changes a Sim's entire life.
Unless every single person had Toddlers, Toddlers just couldn't be in the game at all. And the only way to make sure, was if Toddlers was a free patch. You wouldn't have the pack Toddler Stuff, because not every person would have it, and you wouldn't have Parenthood, because most of that involves so much of Toddlers.
The question among EA was, "Do we pay Devs to make this free patch and make back the money on child-based packs? Or do we just ignore everybody who says they miss Toddlers, like the old EA would?"
TS4 isn't bigger than TS3 was and it is much more simplified. Therefore I can't see why EA would need more developers for TS4 than for TS3 which had an open world and got much bigger expansions?
You can't convince me by telling me about other games which I don't even know or which I know have become much bigger than they were earlier - because I of course agree that such games that have grown a lot likely have got more developers. But TS4 alas isn't such a game at all. So you need to find something much more convincing to convince me. Also don't look for action games because TS4 isn't such a game anyway. The main reasons that you can't convince me by examples of action games are though:
1. I know that many action games have grown and become much bigger than they were earlier.
2. I don't know more about action games because I don't play them. I am mainly a strategic gamer who usually always avoid both action games and sports games.
We seem to agree even though most simmers here don't.
The point is that the way they're making money is by selling entertainment. If they can't make an entertaining product, they've failed.
It's always tough to know whether to blame EA or Devs for something. EA at the top, the budgeteers, are a bunch of suits, and we are supposed to think of the Devs as friendly people who we could sit down with and talk games with, who want to make good games out of the sheer goodness of their heart. It's hard to deny that Devs want to make a product they can be proud of.
However, since EA is a business, the Devs have a limit on what they can do for us. EA budgets them (and their other big boys). They hire and fire, and decide how much to pay them, and give them deadlines. You know why ET the Video Game was so bad? The programmer was budgeted with six weeks to make the game at a time when six months was the norm. "We want this, and this is when we want it done for."
The Devs, on the other hand, are making the product. They can't make if fun and fulfilling if they don't know what we want. And since some of them are into public relations and hang round here most of the day, they SHOULD know what we want. It doesn't benefit anybody if they give us the ability to pick our noses in a Stuff Pack if we're crying out for wicker chairs.
THey've no reason to create a 'fake' event. An event like this takes time to set up. Some of you say "Laundry was bound to win". If it was so very obvious that it would win, and our choices meant nothing at all to progress, why bother with the event at all? Why bother suggesting other kinds of packs that may well be made in the future anyway?
So if a lot of the stuff was rather similar, it means mostly that they're offering us a choice between things they think we'll like.
@Loanet i agree that they probably wanted to gauge our interest in these other packs but I also believe these were all bound to lose against laundry. I'm not saying they did it necessarily on purpose but it was pretty obvious a feature people have been whining about for ages would more than likely win even if the other features were interesting too. I hope like you say that they're not off the table and make it into a pack some other way but I think without laundry or with laundry being included in every idea anyway the vote would have turned out much differently
Also, don't forget that with TS3, there was actually more than one team and physical studio involved with its development over time. There was the "main" studio in Redwood Shores that handled much of the primary development along with many of the packs, but there was also a secondary studio in Salt Lake City that also took on some of the development and some packs as well as some of the store content (this was also why we had two expansion packs within a month or so of release, as one pack was developed by the team in Redwood Shores and the other was developed independently by the team in Salt Lake City).
One of the Simgurus had commented much later on in a write-up somewhere that one of the issues that arose from this situation was that it created some problems with the process overall where the game was concerned along with issues involving quality control. For example, when the Supernatural pack was released, we were able to disable many of the non-Sim "character" types that had either previously been introduced into the game or in the pack (or able to make our sims into some of them and that each type had a special frame attached), but we were not able to do so with a new type introduced in a pack released around that same time (I now can't remember what it was, but I do remember many players complaining about that fact around that time) as in developing each pack separately, the team that was working on Supernatural did not have access to what the other team was working on. It also created some other quality control issues as well in having such a setup. In a sense, it was a classic case of where the left hand sometimes didn't know what the right was doing and that had an impact upon the game.
From my understanding, once development for Sims3 officially ended, the team from Salt Lake City was disbanded (I'm not sure how many are still working for EA versus how many were laid off, however) and the same Simguru had commented that in having had that setup, it made for a nightmarish situation in terms of both logistics and the impact it had upon development. Whereas with Sims4, everything is handled by just the one team at Redwood Shores.
Who said EA doesn't have a sense of humor
Pokemon, Cilization and Anno aren't action games or sport games, they are respectively RPG, strategy and city building. And you can't seriously claim you're a strategic gamer if you haven't played Civilization. It's THE reference in strategy pc games. You should totally try it if you haven't !
I'm afraid I won't be able to convince you simply because you can't look at games from a developper point of view, which is certainly understandable considering you've never worked as a developper, so you view them from a customer's perspective only. So for you, bigger imply more content or more features (the visible tip of the iceberg) and not the underlying systems. To go from TS2 Bella to TS4 Bella, there's no magical "Improve" button that will do all for you, there's work needed.
We know some devs from Simcity are working on TS4. SimGuruGeorge was producer on Simcity and he's now working on GPs for example.
Sorry if I am wrong, but I do not see the difference in you and a Game Critic. I do not think any play all game, do they?
Also, I think the developers are learning because we scream loud
Who said EA doesn't have a sense of humor
You're completely right of course, the suits up top also have to be satisfied, which mostly comes in the terms of deadlines and sales figures. It's a quantity or quality thing, in some ways. Devs want to turn out a product they can be proud of, but they also have jobs to keep. After all, if they lose their jobs they won't be able to turn out any product at all.
EA sometimes makes it mightily hard for Devs to turn out a good game. Try GTW. Awesome idea. The trouble is that they had a deadline. So one profession, ironically the profession that has the least depth, got a whole lot more work done on it.
You sure haven't worked as a developer either
I think that the difference between us is that you mainly are a gamer who admires all the moderators because you don't have the knowledge to mod or program yourself. Therefore you seem to think that the modders are almost gods even though most of them are just young people who are interested in learning about games and programming games. Maybe because they dream about becoming game programmers themselves. So they have just installed some modding tools from the internet and use those tools to curiously study the game code to understand just a little about how it is made. Then they feel as big heroes when they also discover how the modding tools can be used to modify the game just a little.
I don't admire them in the same way as you do because I know that I could do the same myself. I am just not interested because prigramming was something I did many years ago in my education to become a computer scientist and which I finally found so boring that I decided to mainly teach students in math instead. Also I don't think that I could make the game much better by modding it anyway and I sure prefer to just play the games instead of using most of my time on modding them. But I understand the young modders who see a future in studying game programming and with a dream about becoming professional game programmers.
Yes and we know a couple of other new TS4 as well. But we know equally many earlier TS4 developers who don't work on TS4 anymore.
1. The amount of SPs released in each financial year.
2. The amount of GPs released in each financial year.
3. The amount of EPs released in each financial year.
4. The amount of and content of free stuff in updates.
5. The intended target group, simpleness and (low) difficulty of the game and all its expansions.
6. The budgets for all releases.
I am also quite sure that EA is in very regular contact with the executive producer who's responsibility it is to make sure that all EA's instructions are followed and to give feedback to EA.
There are other problems too. To me it seems that EA mainly want impressing things that can be shown in videos before each expansion is released but doesn't care much about depth or bugfixing. Likely because the main target group are very young teens who are curious enough to get all the expansions if they look interesting in the videos but who have a lot of other interests too and therefore mainly only play the game shortly after each release of an expansion. Therefore they most often won't even see the problems which can arise if we play the game much longer than such young teens usually will do.
I am only a gamer who is interested in games for my own pleasure. So I only study games for two private purposes:
1. To find games that I want to play myself.
2. To be able to more easily predict which way the whole game business is going.
Most people here don't seem to understand this though because they are mainly only interested in the Sims games and their own dreams about them. Therefore there seem to be a lot of wishful thinking in this forum and people quite often even become angry if EA does something else or just if somebody predicts something that they don't want to become true
Honestly, you sound like you're trying to flip the script because someone accurately pointed out that you aren't well-informed on an experiencing level on the inner workings of developing a video game.
Nobody needs to be a game developer to analyze games themselves, but it certainly makes a difference if you're trying to analyze the capabilities of a dev team.
Also, your view on modding is very strange to me. It's like you're throwing up this straw-man argument that modders think they are amazing, so that you can tear them down. It's just weird. I've been modding obsessively and intensively for over six months now and I can tell you, it's really hard to be egotistical as a modder (at least for me) because for every problem you solve and every question you answer, there's always an endless supply of more problems and issues waiting around the corner to throw up brick walls in your face. Modders can be, at any given time, trying to grasp anything and everything there is to do with making the game and putting it together. Some aspects are harder to mess with, with this game, like UI, but a lot of the game is editable and most paid developers in a large team are going to have specialized roles, so it's like you're going full-on indie, trying to learn everybody's job enough that you can do it in varying degrees, or at least understand how it functions.
There's nothing magical about it. It's just hard, grueling self-teaching that happens to be rewarding and enjoyable enough for some people that they're motivated to put the time in. It's also a decent way of getting game dev experience, so that you can break into the industry, if that's something you're looking to do, since game companies generally want people who are self-starters enough to have made some games themselves in some way.