And that's why the game is a success, the majority of games don't have a base consisting of 50% females (which isn't an exact figure given in the article ). In earlier iterations the numbers were around 65% in favor of women, so the demographic seems to have shifted a bit. But this shift still doesn't negate that women are play a very significant role in the series' success. When you start alienating or minimizing the significance of a large portion your demographic you start running into problems as evidenced with TS4.
All I'm saying is The Sims series core demographic is/has been women. If you were to draw a bell curve of the audience of Sims players you'd find the largest part of the curve would consist of women.
"U.S. game publisher Electronics Arts Inc., rolls out in the coming weeks it's "The Sims 4" game—a life-simulation game in the publisher's widely popular Sims series for PCs. Rachel Franklin, the game's executive producer and a games industry veteran, said approximately half of The Sims' player-base are women."
And that's why the game is a success, the majority of games don't have a base consisting of 50% females (which isn't an exact figure given in the article ). In earlier iterations the numbers were around 65% in favor of women, so the demographic seems to have shifted a bit. But this shift still doesn't negate that women are play a very significant role in the series' success. When you start alienating or minimizing the significance of a large portion your demographic you start running into problems as evidenced with TS4.
All I'm saying is The Sims series core demographic is/has been women. If you were to draw a bell curve of the audience of Sims players you'd find the largest part of the curve would consist of women.
"U.S. game publisher Electronics Arts Inc., rolls out in the coming weeks it's "The Sims 4" game—a life-simulation game in the publisher's widely popular Sims series for PCs. Rachel Franklin, the game's executive producer and a games industry veteran, said approximately half of The Sims' player-base are women."
I agree (I think). What I don't understand is why it feels like Maxis thinks women aren't as discriminating about games as are men.
To be honest, the whole gaming industry is going downhill. It is just really noticeable because of the type of game that The Sims is. I remember a few Call Of Duty's ago, I thought...wow, the campaign was so short. I finished it in a day. Well fast forward to Ghosts and I finished it in a few hours. And that has become the standard. Most games emphasize multi-player because that doesn't require as much work as a single player experience. Some games don't even offer a single player mode anymore. Don't get me started on the amount of videos we have to watch while we play.
I agree that the market was recovering from the mishaps of the 90's when the Sims debuted.
I know that the reason all the hoopla was made about The Sims and its success was made because EA had captured the magical unicorn, getting a majority of women to support a video game title. It was absolutely unheard of at that time, for a mainstream game to have a fan base whose majority was female. I really wish I'd saved those articles now.
No, males were never majority in the beginning. Its killing me that I can't find the articles I read back in 2001-2004, I remember it so well because I was still in college getting my degree (and doing case studies for my classes) when I read them.
Everyone was shocked that the demographic majority was in favor of women from the beginning, because up until that point, aming was a male arena. The Sims really opened the eyes of devs, publishers, marketers, to the fact that women do in fact enjoy games, and will buy them. The current shift means that more males have entered into The Sims core demographic, not the other way around.
That's what makes the number of women and its historic majority surprising. Will Wright didn't design the game as a female game. It was a very welcome surprise that women embraced the game so well. That passion for the game from women is what launched the game into the best selling franchise of all time. Acknowledging that doesn't mean that it's girl game or that men don't play. It's just a happy fact in the history of the series.
Sims actually, at least on gaming boards, has always been considered a game for everyone. One of my favorite threads on a "hard core" board was people making Sims of their favorite videogame characters. I first asked about the Sims on a "hard core" gaming board and every guy there played, and all had strong opinions about Sims 2 and Sims 3 (and their preferences were STRONG).
I think it's the devs who misunderstood the market and thought it was a game that appealed primarily to girls.
I edited my message, but I'll repeat the edit here (in essence). As more and more women enter the gaming world, it doesn't make sense that their proportion of sim games would shrink, so if the numbers are 50/50 now, it's more likely that males have always been the majority of Sims players and females are a growing segment (from 20% to 50% just going from articles quoted here).
Even a 20% (that is the only figure backed up here, so that's the one I'm going with) would have been shocking in 2000. That's a lot of women gamers, far more than anyone thought would be interested in gamings due to the game devs screw ups of misunderstanding the market in the 1990s (I can get into that if no one knows what I'm talking about).
I wish you had those articles as well. The best I can find is Humble saying that the majority of their audience was teen girls, but I have a strong suspicion that he was going on his beliefs about the game instead of actual data, for the reasons I already stated -- the believed 50/50 male to female gamer ratio of Sims 3. Females are the growing market segment, not males, by a large amount. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if Sims followed the trend of women gamers -- no clue what our numbers were in 2000, though.
Edit: But again, even 20% women gamers in 2000 would have been huge and considered the magic unicorn.
I have been playing video games since the late 80's. I do not believe that female gamers is new even in 2000. I think that people may have started looking at demographics a certain time.
Oh, I've been playing videogames since before you Female gamers have always been a thing, but the devs have until recently been the good ol' boy network. In the 1990s, they decided to try to start making games aimed at girls, but went with what guys thought girls would like and slapped a coat of pink onto perfectly dreadful games, and then came to the conclusion that girls don't like video games. When I played MMOs, I was surprised (once vent became a thing) how many of the MMO players actually were female. Actually, that may have been what clued game developers in that women are a market.
Developers like Bioware are amazing in that they actually reach out in their stories to audiences other than straight males, and while that caused them a lot of backlash among parts that audience for their being content they wouldn't ever use (their forums at times in the past were a complete mess because of this), it earned them the loyalty of other parts of their audience which turns out is large enough that paid off for them. I even forgave them Dragon Age 2 for that reason
When I see numbers tossed around about what proportion of the sims gamers are what gender, I have to wonder how they're collecting that information. I have a feeling the methods are pretty flawed, in truth, especially since they all seem to have a different idea of what that number is.
In the 1980s almost all gamers were boys. At that time girls discussed why their boring boyfriends used so much time on something so boring as computers. But since then things have graduately changed. Most games have still most males among their fans. But even shooters, war games and sports games are now also more and more played by girls.
Maybe in your country but not here in USA in the 80's. I know girls that gamed including myself. We sill game
I was a gamer in the 80s...I played all my Atari games everyday. I saved up my allowance to by or rent new Atari games every week. I've been gaming since I could hold a controller and my parents could afford a computer.
I think it is belittling to negate female gamers. Just because games weren't aimed at us doesn't mean we weren't playing. It's not my fault society thinks I only like pink sparkly things. If they bothered to ask, I'm sure they would see women are just as diverse in what they like as men.
#NotAPrincess
I just remembered something funny. I bought a Commadore 64 for my sons in the early 80's and they had to type their games into it.
When I was about 10 I was listening to the news on the radio and heard them talk about things that were coming in the future and computers with screens that you could play games on was announced. I was so jealous because I would have been an adult by the time those computer games were available. Then I thought to myself - I don't care I'll play them anyway.
And I do. It has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with interest. I don't know any of my friends who play games and most of them won't even get onto the computer at home other than to use email.
And that's why the game is a success, the majority of games don't have a base consisting of 50% females (which isn't an exact figure given in the article ). In earlier iterations the numbers were around 65% in favor of women, so the demographic seems to have shifted a bit. But this shift still doesn't negate that women are play a very significant role in the series' success. When you start alienating or minimizing the significance of a large portion your demographic you start running into problems as evidenced with TS4.
All I'm saying is The Sims series core demographic is/has been women. If you were to draw a bell curve of the audience of Sims players you'd find the largest part of the curve would consist of women.
"U.S. game publisher Electronics Arts Inc., rolls out in the coming weeks it's "The Sims 4" game—a life-simulation game in the publisher's widely popular Sims series for PCs. Rachel Franklin, the game's executive producer and a games industry veteran, said approximately half of The Sims' player-base are women."
I agree (I think). What I don't understand is why it feels like Maxis thinks women aren't as discriminating about games as are men.
To be honest, the whole gaming industry is going downhill. It is just really noticeable because of the type of game that The Sims is. I remember a few Call Of Duty's ago, I thought...wow, the campaign was so short. I finished it in a day. Well fast forward to Ghosts and I finished it in a few hours. And that has become the standard. Most games emphasize multi-player because that doesn't require as much work as a single player experience. Some games don't even offer a single player mode anymore. Don't get me started on the amount of videos we have to watch while we play.
Yeah, the Madden titles and Call of Duty are barely graphical buffs charged as if they were whole new games. You might as well call them over-priced DLC. AT LEAST they don't release a new game bereft of base features that were standard five years earlier...
I think TS4 sales were much higher than even EA anticipated during the last quarter. They seem really surprised by it, IMO.
However, and of course this is just my opinion, but I doubt those higher sales can be maintained. There are too many players who have given up, and more continue to give up each day. I know I'm only one person, but I bought OR and GTW because I'm a Simmer and really tried to like this game, but haven't purchased anything since and won't be buying any of it. There are others out there who have bought the game but aren't buying anything now.
Personally I went back to playing TS3, since they couldn't be bothered to actually make an improved, upgraded game this time around.
I also got the vibe the sales were better than they expected based on their smug behaviour. It really saddens me somehow, because I'm sure the sims team got a normal budget for TS4 and just wasted half of it for the Olympus and seeing as they probably still got a fair amount of money out of it, I think next time EA will just give them half the budget from the get-go, because "sims fans just buy the plum anyway".
Just my personal opinion of course, I don't have any numbers to prove it.
And that's why the game is a success, the majority of games don't have a base consisting of 50% females (which isn't an exact figure given in the article ). In earlier iterations the numbers were around 65% in favor of women, so the demographic seems to have shifted a bit. But this shift still doesn't negate that women are play a very significant role in the series' success. When you start alienating or minimizing the significance of a large portion your demographic you start running into problems as evidenced with TS4.
All I'm saying is The Sims series core demographic is/has been women. If you were to draw a bell curve of the audience of Sims players you'd find the largest part of the curve would consist of women.
"U.S. game publisher Electronics Arts Inc., rolls out in the coming weeks it's "The Sims 4" game—a life-simulation game in the publisher's widely popular Sims series for PCs. Rachel Franklin, the game's executive producer and a games industry veteran, said approximately half of The Sims' player-base are women."
I agree (I think). What I don't understand is why it feels like Maxis thinks women aren't as discriminating about games as are men.
This is because you think that TS4 is targeted at women while it actually still is targeted at teen girls(primarily) and teen boys who don't like shooters and similar games. We are many in this forum who aren't in the target group at all!
But the game is doing very good anyway and TS4 even was the best selling of all PC games in 2014 according to a source. We don't yet know how well it's expansions are selling though. But they probably have at least acceptable sales numbers because so many have the basegame. Teens who didn't play the previous Sims games aren't so critical about the game as we are because we compare it to all previous Sims games. I think that it is mainly in this comparison that TS4 fails to impress us.
I agree that the market was recovering from the mishaps of the 90's when the Sims debuted.
I know that the reason all the hoopla was made about The Sims and its success was made because EA had captured the magical unicorn, getting a majority of women to support a video game title. It was absolutely unheard of at that time, for a mainstream game to have a fan base whose majority was female. I really wish I'd saved those articles now.
No, males were never majority in the beginning. Its killing me that I can't find the articles I read back in 2001-2004, I remember it so well because I was still in college getting my degree (and doing case studies for my classes) when I read them.
Everyone was shocked that the demographic majority was in favor of women from the beginning, because up until that point, aming was a male arena. The Sims really opened the eyes of devs, publishers, marketers, to the fact that women do in fact enjoy games, and will buy them. The current shift means that more males have entered into The Sims core demographic, not the other way around.
That's what makes the number of women and its historic majority surprising. Will Wright didn't design the game as a female game. It was a very welcome surprise that women embraced the game so well. That passion for the game from women is what launched the game into the best selling franchise of all time. Acknowledging that doesn't mean that it's girl game or that men don't play. It's just a happy fact in the history of the series.
Sims actually, at least on gaming boards, has always been considered a game for everyone. One of my favorite threads on a "hard core" board was people making Sims of their favorite videogame characters. I first asked about the Sims on a "hard core" gaming board and every guy there played, and all had strong opinions about Sims 2 and Sims 3 (and their preferences were STRONG).
I think it's the devs who misunderstood the market and thought it was a game that appealed primarily to girls.
I edited my message, but I'll repeat the edit here (in essence). As more and more women enter the gaming world, it doesn't make sense that their proportion of sim games would shrink, so if the numbers are 50/50 now, it's more likely that males have always been the majority of Sims players and females are a growing segment (from 20% to 50% just going from articles quoted here).
Even a 20% (that is the only figure backed up here, so that's the one I'm going with) would have been shocking in 2000. That's a lot of women gamers, far more than anyone thought would be interested in gamings due to the game devs screw ups of misunderstanding the market in the 1990s (I can get into that if no one knows what I'm talking about).
I wish you had those articles as well. The best I can find is Humble saying that the majority of their audience was teen girls, but I have a strong suspicion that he was going on his beliefs about the game instead of actual data, for the reasons I already stated -- the believed 50/50 male to female gamer ratio of Sims 3. Females are the growing market segment, not males, by a large amount. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if Sims followed the trend of women gamers -- no clue what our numbers were in 2000, though.
Edit: But again, even 20% women gamers in 2000 would have been huge and considered the magic unicorn.
I have been playing video games since the late 80's. I do not believe that female gamers is new even in 2000. I think that people may have started looking at demographics a certain time.
Oh, I've been playing videogames since before you Female gamers have always been a thing, but the devs have until recently been the good ol' boy network. In the 1990s, they decided to try to start making games aimed at girls, but went with what guys thought girls would like and slapped a coat of pink onto perfectly dreadful games, and then came to the conclusion that girls don't like video games. When I played MMOs, I was surprised (once vent became a thing) how many of the MMO players actually were female. Actually, that may have been what clued game developers in that women are a market.
Developers like Bioware are amazing in that they actually reach out in their stories to audiences other than straight males, and while that caused them a lot of backlash among parts that audience for their being content they wouldn't ever use (their forums at times in the past were a complete mess because of this), it earned them the loyalty of other parts of their audience which turns out is large enough that paid off for them. I even forgave them Dragon Age 2 for that reason
When I see numbers tossed around about what proportion of the sims gamers are what gender, I have to wonder how they're collecting that information. I have a feeling the methods are pretty flawed, in truth, especially since they all seem to have a different idea of what that number is.
In the 1980s almost all gamers were boys. At that time girls discussed why their boring boyfriends used so much time on something so boring as computers. But since then things have graduately changed. Most games have still most males among their fans. But even shooters, war games and sports games are now also more and more played by girls.
For the Sims games I believe that things have changed the other way around because I believe that TS1 was almost exclusively played by girls. But now there are not nearly the same difference between the number of male and female simmers.
In another area things have changed even more even though I don't know if those changes have any relations to the changes in gaming. But in Danish high school most pupils in the 1960s and 1970s were boys and probably only every third pupil were a girl. But today 2 out of every 3 pupils in Danish high schools are girls and the boys in high schools are just fewer and fewer. Is this also something that happens in other countries than Denmark?
Sorry was late getting back to you, but been off busy playing sims 2. On the gender thing, I been gaming before Windows PC was invented. Heck before we even had computers at home. Sims 1 was marketed for everyone, because it was totally new, there was no demographic, originally they didn't even know who to sell it to.
Everyone picked it up, because it was different, but right away it made a sensation because all the hidden women who they didn't know were playing games, picked Sims 1 up in significant numbers and then gaming companies knew there was a female market. (I'm female by the way) Most men I know who play computer games have some experience with Sims 1, they bought it, they enjoyed it, then got turned off by many expansion packs. Many of our top modders if you notice present themselves as men. (Pescado, Twallian, Zerbu etc..)
That brings me to simcity, and it's important. The Sims comes from simcity, simcity was built first, but the sims is just an expansion of the maxis simulation games they've always made (after Sim Ant, Sim Tower, Sim Farm etc). The orginal sim 1 game was actually about ants in fact. There was also a bridge game never released called Simsville and bits of it made it's way into sims 2. Simsville simulated at the level of neighbourhoods instead of towns (simcity) or people (The sims) Sim 2 actually gives you the ability to transfer sims into Simcity 4 and follow them and Simcity 4 allows you to build towns and transfer them into Sims 2 to live in. The games used to be linked and done by one set of developers called Maxis. LGR who plays all Maxis games has done a big overview the whole issue.
Now after Sim city 4, they released Sim Societies, it was totally different and did something different. The reviews were mixed, many fans did not buy and Sim city was stuck on the shelf for 10 years. Until Simcity 2013, which was a game awaited for many, many years. A persistent online connection which fans objected to (and EA refused to remove) hit the sales, had the fans deserting the game and left the follow up expansion on the shelf. Yep, you can buy Simcity (down from about $60 and now found in the bargain basement bin for around $5. If that's where Sims 4 is heading, then nope I don't call that doing well, the franchise will be in trouble. The modders have left, the online (as I hear) is deserted, but the new city skyline game has modders, fans, wonderful reviews galore, and people are raving about it's recent expansion even though they have patched the most important things for free. Maxis Redwood has been closed (the original maxis who have always been in charge of Simcity), their staff have been sacked and they are now making mods and asking for change on the Sky Line boards.
In a worrying sign for sims 4, some modders have also quit, leaving their mods unsupported, and watching youtube I am aware how many have quit, saying sims 4 just dosent have enough content and things to do. Again surprising for a game not even a year old, whilst I seeing more let's plays for sims 1 and sims 2.
I been tracking Sims 4, and since it released in September 2014, it has been at half price or less EVERY SINGLE MONTH. For a new released game, that's worrying. I wonder if that will happen to GTA 5, The Witcher, or Fallout 4 in a year. I find the development of Simcity very interesting, because watching the history of Simcity, Maxis and The Sims gives me a good idea where this franchise is heading. (spore is another good example from the past)
PS: Denmark's market is very different from what I'm seeing in the USA and the UK. It seems to be younger and more female focused. From what I can see around the internet, young girls are having a problem buying stuff for sims 4. The base game was too expensive and the expansions come round too quickly for them afford to keep up.
Guess I been around a long time, none of this is new, I can see when a company or franchise is having trouble and I know it's not optimism that will help it get through, rather the company better open it's ears and start listening very carefully to their customers
SIMS 3:YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THE SIMS LIKE THIS BEFORE! This #1 bestselling award-winner* is better than ever on iPhone and iPod. Contains direct links to the Internet; Collects data though third party ad serving analytics technology. EA may retire online features and services after 30 days’ notice.
I just want to say something here.
We all know the game has too many problems. More than any previous sims game
The developers are very very slow in addressing the issues. And each pack released will add new problems.
With this slow pace do you think this game will ever be fixed to be in an acceptable condition?
I don't think so. I just feel TS4 is never going to make it. EA is not serious about it, maybe because they are making some profit, but what I know that the game is losing more supporters every day so this profit will sure going to take a hit.
When sales get less and less, then EA's only way is to lower the cost and quality of these packs further more in order to maximize the profit from the people who are buying. They will have to recover lost sales from the people who stopped buying the packs by giving the players who buy them more half baked packs. In other words milking them to the full capacity. Sure the prices will remain the same but the packs will be shallower, and become more superficial and half baked. That way if they used to make a profit of $4 from one player they are going to make $6 due to reduced cost.
So some people might ask what is the current quality?
An example is replacing a real bear with a costume! like this
Suppose bear was not in the game and they needed to add it but want to further lower the quality due to less sales they would have not made the costume but a bear statue instead! That what I am expecting to happen with future packs. The badly planned stuff to get worse.
While in other games this is how bear is done.
Everything I post is an opinion here and I think every post of others is as well.
I agree that the market was recovering from the mishaps of the 90's when the Sims debuted.
I know that the reason all the hoopla was made about The Sims and its success was made because EA had captured the magical unicorn, getting a majority of women to support a video game title. It was absolutely unheard of at that time, for a mainstream game to have a fan base whose majority was female. I really wish I'd saved those articles now.
No, males were never majority in the beginning. Its killing me that I can't find the articles I read back in 2001-2004, I remember it so well because I was still in college getting my degree (and doing case studies for my classes) when I read them.
Everyone was shocked that the demographic majority was in favor of women from the beginning, because up until that point, aming was a male arena. The Sims really opened the eyes of devs, publishers, marketers, to the fact that women do in fact enjoy games, and will buy them. The current shift means that more males have entered into The Sims core demographic, not the other way around.
That's what makes the number of women and its historic majority surprising. Will Wright didn't design the game as a female game. It was a very welcome surprise that women embraced the game so well. That passion for the game from women is what launched the game into the best selling franchise of all time. Acknowledging that doesn't mean that it's girl game or that men don't play. It's just a happy fact in the history of the series.
Sims actually, at least on gaming boards, has always been considered a game for everyone. One of my favorite threads on a "hard core" board was people making Sims of their favorite videogame characters. I first asked about the Sims on a "hard core" gaming board and every guy there played, and all had strong opinions about Sims 2 and Sims 3 (and their preferences were STRONG).
I think it's the devs who misunderstood the market and thought it was a game that appealed primarily to girls.
I edited my message, but I'll repeat the edit here (in essence). As more and more women enter the gaming world, it doesn't make sense that their proportion of sim games would shrink, so if the numbers are 50/50 now, it's more likely that males have always been the majority of Sims players and females are a growing segment (from 20% to 50% just going from articles quoted here).
Even a 20% (that is the only figure backed up here, so that's the one I'm going with) would have been shocking in 2000. That's a lot of women gamers, far more than anyone thought would be interested in gamings due to the game devs screw ups of misunderstanding the market in the 1990s (I can get into that if no one knows what I'm talking about).
I wish you had those articles as well. The best I can find is Humble saying that the majority of their audience was teen girls, but I have a strong suspicion that he was going on his beliefs about the game instead of actual data, for the reasons I already stated -- the believed 50/50 male to female gamer ratio of Sims 3. Females are the growing market segment, not males, by a large amount. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if Sims followed the trend of women gamers -- no clue what our numbers were in 2000, though.
Edit: But again, even 20% women gamers in 2000 would have been huge and considered the magic unicorn.
I have been playing video games since the late 80's. I do not believe that female gamers is new even in 2000. I think that people may have started looking at demographics a certain time.
Oh, I've been playing videogames since before you Female gamers have always been a thing, but the devs have until recently been the good ol' boy network. In the 1990s, they decided to try to start making games aimed at girls, but went with what guys thought girls would like and slapped a coat of pink onto perfectly dreadful games, and then came to the conclusion that girls don't like video games. When I played MMOs, I was surprised (once vent became a thing) how many of the MMO players actually were female. Actually, that may have been what clued game developers in that women are a market.
Developers like Bioware are amazing in that they actually reach out in their stories to audiences other than straight males, and while that caused them a lot of backlash among parts that audience for their being content they wouldn't ever use (their forums at times in the past were a complete mess because of this), it earned them the loyalty of other parts of their audience which turns out is large enough that paid off for them. I even forgave them Dragon Age 2 for that reason
When I see numbers tossed around about what proportion of the sims gamers are what gender, I have to wonder how they're collecting that information. I have a feeling the methods are pretty flawed, in truth, especially since they all seem to have a different idea of what that number is.
In the 1980s almost all gamers were boys. At that time girls discussed why their boring boyfriends used so much time on something so boring as computers. But since then things have graduately changed. Most games have still most males among their fans. But even shooters, war games and sports games are now also more and more played by girls.
For the Sims games I believe that things have changed the other way around because I believe that TS1 was almost exclusively played by girls. But now there are not nearly the same difference between the number of male and female simmers.
In another area things have changed even more even though I don't know if those changes have any relations to the changes in gaming. But in Danish high school most pupils in the 1960s and 1970s were boys and probably only every third pupil were a girl. But today 2 out of every 3 pupils in Danish high schools are girls and the boys in high schools are just fewer and fewer. Is this also something that happens in other countries than Denmark?
Sorry was late getting back to you, but been off busy playing sims 2. On the gender thing, I been gaming before Windows PC was invented. Heck before we even had computers at home. Sims 1 was marketed for everyone, because it was totally new, there was no demographic, originally they didn't even know who to sell it to.
Everyone picked it up, because it was different, but right away it made a sensation because all the hidden women who they didn't know were playing games, picked Sims 1 up in significant numbers and then gaming companies knew there was a female market. (I'm female by the way) Most men I know who play computer games have some experience with Sims 1, they bought it, they enjoyed it, then got turned off by many expansion packs. Many of our top modders if you notice present themselves as men. (Pescado, Twallian, Zerbu etc..)
That brings me to simcity, and it's important. The Sims comes from simcity, simcity was built first, but the sims is just an expansion of the maxis simulation games they've always made (after Sim Ant, Sim Tower, Sim Farm etc). The orginal sim 1 game was actually about ants in fact. There was also a bridge game never released called Simsville and bits of it made it's way into sims 2. Simsville simulated at the level of neighbourhoods instead of towns (simcity) or people (The sims) Sim 2 actually gives you the ability to transfer sims into Simcity 4 and follow them and Simcity 4 allows you to build towns and transfer them into Sims 2 to live in. The games used to be linked and done by one set of developers called Maxis. LGR who plays all Maxis games has done a big overview the whole issue.
Now after Sim city 4, they released Sim Societies, it was totally different and did something different. The reviews were mixed, many fans did not buy and Sim city was stuck on the shelf for 10 years. Until Simcity 2013, which was a game awaited for many, many years. A persistent online connection which fans objected to (and EA refused to remove) hit the sales, had the fans deserting the game and left the follow up expansion on the shelf. Yep, you can buy Simcity (down from about $60 and now found in the bargain basement bin for around $5. If that's where Sims 4 is heading, then nope I don't call that doing well, the franchise will be in trouble. The modders have left, the online (as I hear) is deserted, but the new city skyline game has modders, fans, wonderful reviews galore, and people are raving about it's recent expansion even though they have patched the most important things for free. Maxis Redwood has been closed (the original maxis who have always been in charge of Simcity), their staff have been sacked and they are now making mods and asking for change on the Sky Line boards.
In a worrying sign for sims 4, some modders have also quit, leaving their mods unsupported, and watching youtube I am aware how many have quit, saying sims 4 just dosent have enough content and things to do. Again surprising for a game not even a year old, whilst I seeing more let's plays for sims 1 and sims 2.
I been tracking Sims 4, and since it released in September 2014, it has been at half price or less EVERY SINGLE MONTH. For a new released game, that's worrying. I wonder if that will happen to GTA 5, The Witcher, or Fallout 4 in a year. I find the development of Simcity very interesting, because watching the history of Simcity, Maxis and The Sims gives me a good idea where this franchise is heading. (spore is another good example from the past)
PS: Denmark's market is very different from what I'm seeing in the USA and the UK. It seems to be younger and more female focused. From what I can see around the internet, young girls are having a problem buying stuff for sims 4. The base game was too expensive and the expansions come round too quickly for them afford to keep up.
Guess I been around a long time, none of this is new, I can see when a company or franchise is having trouble and I know it's not optimism that will help it get through, rather the company better open it's ears and start listening very carefully to their customers
I don't doubt that female gamers exited even back in the 1980s when PC gaming started. But they were a small minority in those days. The reason was that the games were made with the purpose to attract boys and no game at the time was made for girls.
This of course didn't completely stop girls from gaming too. But the most popular games at the time was war simulations and flight simulators from especially Microprose. Flighing dangerous missions over enemy territories and fighting head to head with enemy aircrafts while being shot on from the ground too wasn't the game's most girls would have preferred at the time. Playing a helicopter simulation like Gunship appealed also more to boys than to girls.
But there are always exceptions. Boxing is still mainly a male sport. But here in Denmark we have Anita Christensen who became a professional world champion in exactly boxing. I have read her biography where she explains how she always followed her big brother in everything. She played soccer with the boys in primary school and found all the girls in her class boring because they played with dolls which she had hated since her parents gave her a doll as a Christmas present while her big brother got cars, tractors and toy soldiers instead. She wanted the same toys as her big brother and she wanted to do the same activities as he did. This continued even when he and one of his friends about 17 years old joined a boxing club because then she did the same. She hadn't expected to get matches though. So she was very surprised when she was ask if she wanted that too. But she accepted and wasn't afraid at all because she had fought with both girls and boys all her life and attempted to learn everything from the boys. The girls in her class had attempted to mob, bully and tease her because she didn't care about them. But then she followed them after school and attacked them. This worked because they weren't used to physical fighting as she was.
The funny thing about Anita Christensen is that she also won a price as a model though. But she stopped modeling because she hated to wear dresses.
Women are now also soldiers in the real world. So maybe they also now are more interested in violent war games than they were in the 1989s and it seems that more and more females become boxers too. But in the beginning it was nearly impossible to find opponents for Anita Christensen. It probably didn't help either that she won all her fights easily because she knew about boxing technics. Her first opponents never knew anything and just tried to scare her which wasn't possible at all.
I am not sure how much difference there are between Denmark and other countries when it comes to teens playing Sims games because I think that teens aren't that different in different countries. A big difference between the English speaking world and the remaining part of Europe is how the adults view teens and rate games like the Sims because PEGI rated the Sims games as suitable for children too until the UK joined PEGI. The US and especially Australia don't think that children should play such games at all and therefore rate them as T or M games. (The M rating is from Australia.) Germany still rates the Sims games as suitable for all ages which Germany can do because Germany has its own USK rating system and doesn't use PEGI like nearly all other European countries do.
So maybe parents in the US don't like their teens to play Sims too much. But in Denmark and most of Europe parents would even help their 7 to 10 years old children to play the game.
SimCity has never been a game for me although I played the very first version when it was released in 1989 and a few year later too. It was interesting. But it wasn't my favorite at all. At that time I preferred games like M1 Tank Platoon from Microprose. I also liked Monkey Iland from LucasArts when it was released in 1990. Other games like Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, Colonization and Covert Action (all from Microprose) I played a lot too. Then there were the adventure games from Sierra, Accolade and similar companies. But only the very first version of SimCity has ever really interested me although I very shortly have attempted the later versions too. But I just found them rather boring. SimAnts I liked though. But it was a very small game.
Sims 1 never interested me when it was released because it looked like just a dollhouse game for girls. I saw that it got expansions too. But only the last EP Makin' Magic caught my interest. But when I saw the videos for TS2 I bought the game imediately and played it a lot for about two years. Then I became bored with extremely low difficulty degree and at the same time EA switched to the dreadful Securom copy protection. This was the end for TS2 for me.
TS1 I bought very discounted after I had played TS2 a lot just to see how TS1 was. I played it a little. But I found it to be too tiring even though a few things were interesting to explore.
SimCity 4 I used to make neighborhoods for TS2. But I never found anything interesting in SimCity 4 besides that.
I am not sure how much difference there are between Denmark and other countries when it comes to teens playing Sims games because I think that teens aren't that different in different countries.
Pregnancy rates alone may give you a little idea about how different teenagers can be. I think teens are all different dependent on where they come from. Some have more outside entertainments, some have less money. To say that all teenagers act just like Dutch one's seems strange to me.
From what I can see of girl teens in the UK, they aint interested in consoles and they aint intrested in PC's. What they love is their smart phones and they are more often seen playing things like kim kardashian thingy and Sims Freeplay. (limited personal experience) Heck, they don't even want a pc when we give them one for free.
SIMS 3:YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THE SIMS LIKE THIS BEFORE! This #1 bestselling award-winner* is better than ever on iPhone and iPod. Contains direct links to the Internet; Collects data though third party ad serving analytics technology. EA may retire online features and services after 30 days’ notice.
And that's why the game is a success, the majority of games don't have a base consisting of 50% females (which isn't an exact figure given in the article ). In earlier iterations the numbers were around 65% in favor of women, so the demographic seems to have shifted a bit. But this shift still doesn't negate that women are play a very significant role in the series' success. When you start alienating or minimizing the significance of a large portion your demographic you start running into problems as evidenced with TS4.
All I'm saying is The Sims series core demographic is/has been women. If you were to draw a bell curve of the audience of Sims players you'd find the largest part of the curve would consist of women.
"U.S. game publisher Electronics Arts Inc., rolls out in the coming weeks it's "The Sims 4" game—a life-simulation game in the publisher's widely popular Sims series for PCs. Rachel Franklin, the game's executive producer and a games industry veteran, said approximately half of The Sims' player-base are women."
I agree (I think). What I don't understand is why it feels like Maxis thinks women aren't as discriminating about games as are men.
This is because you think that TS4 is targeted at women while it actually still is targeted at teen girls(primarily) and teen boys who don't like shooters and similar games. We are many in this forum who aren't in the target group at all!
But the game is doing very good anyway and TS4 even was the best selling of all PC games in 2014 according to a source. We don't yet know how well it's expansions are selling though. But they probably have at least acceptable sales numbers because so many have the basegame. Teens who didn't play the previous Sims games aren't so critical about the game as we are because we compare it to all previous Sims games. I think that it is mainly in this comparison that TS4 fails to impress us.
Best selling of all PC games in 2014 is not saying much. It's like being the thinnest kid at fat camp.
I just want to say something here.
We all know the game has too many problems. More than any previous sims game
The developers are very very slow in addressing the issues. And each pack released will add new problems.
With this slow pace do you think this game will ever be fixed to be in an acceptable condition?
I don't think so. I just feel TS4 is never going to make it. EA is not serious about it, maybe because they are making some profit, but what I know that the game is losing more supporters every day so this profit will sure going to take a hit.
When sales get less and less, then EA's only way is to lower the cost and quality of these packs further more in order to maximize the profit from the people who are buying. They will have to recover lost sales from the people who stopped buying the packs by giving the players who buy them more half baked packs. In other words milking them to the full capacity. Sure the prices will remain the same but the packs will be shallower, and become more superficial and half baked. That way if they used to make a profit of $4 from one player they are going to make $6 due to reduced cost.
So some people might ask what is the current quality?
An example is replacing a real bear with a costume! like this
Suppose bear was not in the game and they needed to add it but want to further lower the quality due to less sales they would have not made the costume but a bear statue instead! That what I am expecting to happen with future packs. The badly planned stuff to get worse.
I just want to say something here.
We all know the game has too many problems. More than any previous sims game
The developers are very very slow in addressing the issues. And each pack released will add new problems.
With this slow pace do you think this game will ever be fixed to be in an acceptable condition?
I don't think so. I just feel TS4 is never going to make it. EA is not serious about it, maybe because they are making some profit, but what I know that the game is losing more supporters every day so this profit will sure going to take a hit.
When sales get less and less, then EA's only way is to lower the cost and quality of these packs further more in order to maximize the profit from the people who are buying. They will have to recover lost sales from the people who stopped buying the packs by giving the players who buy them more half baked packs. In other words milking them to the full capacity. Sure the prices will remain the same but the packs will be shallower, and become more superficial and half baked. That way if they used to make a profit of $4 from one player they are going to make $6 due to reduced cost.
So some people might ask what is the current quality?
An example is replacing a real bear with a costume! like this
Suppose bear was not in the game and they needed to add it but want to further lower the quality due to less sales they would have not made the costume but a bear statue instead! That what I am expecting to happen with future packs. The badly planned stuff to get worse.
I am not sure how much difference there are between Denmark and other countries when it comes to teens playing Sims games because I think that teens aren't that different in different countries.
Pregnancy rates alone may give you a little idea about how different teenagers can be. I think teens are all different dependent on where they come from. Some have more outside entertainments, some have less money. To say that all teenagers act just like Dutch one's seems strange to me.
From what I can see of girl teens in the UK, they aint interested in consoles and they aint intrested in PC's. What they love is their smart phones and they are more often seen playing things like kim kardashian thingy and Sims Freeplay. (limited personal experience) Heck, they don't even want a pc when we give them one for free.
The reason isn't that teens are less sexual active here at all. I actually think that quite the opposite is true. But even teens know everything about avoiding pregnancy here in Denmark because they learn about such things in school. So their parents aren't scared about unwanted pregnancies at all.
Teens and pretteens in Denmark haven't always the money to buy Sims games either. I could see that very clearly in the Sims 2 forum which they dominated. (Only one or two of them followed us later to the Sims 3 forum from where they also disappeared after some time.) But they found ways to get the games anyway. If nothing else worked they just persuaded their parents to give them Sims games both for their birthdays and for Christmas.
I just want to say something here.
We all know the game has too many problems. More than any previous sims game
The developers are very very slow in addressing the issues. And each pack released will add new problems.
With this slow pace do you think this game will ever be fixed to be in an acceptable condition?
I don't think so. I just feel TS4 is never going to make it. EA is not serious about it, maybe because they are making some profit, but what I know that the game is losing more supporters every day so this profit will sure going to take a hit.
When sales get less and less, then EA's only way is to lower the cost and quality of these packs further more in order to maximize the profit from the people who are buying. They will have to recover lost sales from the people who stopped buying the packs by giving the players who buy them more half baked packs. In other words milking them to the full capacity. Sure the prices will remain the same but the packs will be shallower, and become more superficial and half baked. That way if they used to make a profit of $4 from one player they are going to make $6 due to reduced cost.
So some people might ask what is the current quality?
An example is replacing a real bear with a costume! like this
Suppose bear was not in the game and they needed to add it but want to further lower the quality due to less sales they would have not made the costume but a bear statue instead! That what I am expecting to happen with future packs. The badly planned stuff to get worse.
While in other games this is how bear is done.
Lower it further?
It wouldn't surprise me unfortunately.
Me neither. It's essentially a stand off between EA and their customers. That's why the 'If Sims4 doesn't sell there won't be 5' comments. They knew people weren't happy with all the cuts.
I'm sure they didn't expect so many loyal customers to reach their personal limits this early on with TS4 and stop buying. They want to see more sales to 'justify' investing further in the base-whereas many of us want to see the premium base we've already paid for to be finished because we already paid! I'm not paying out twice because the studio couldn't manage their time or budget properly. Their mistake, not mine.
I just want to say something here.
We all know the game has too many problems. More than any previous sims game
The developers are very very slow in addressing the issues. And each pack released will add new problems.
With this slow pace do you think this game will ever be fixed to be in an acceptable condition?
I don't think so. I just feel TS4 is never going to make it. EA is not serious about it, maybe because they are making some profit, but what I know that the game is losing more supporters every day so this profit will sure going to take a hit.
When sales get less and less, then EA's only way is to lower the cost and quality of these packs further more in order to maximize the profit from the people who are buying. They will have to recover lost sales from the people who stopped buying the packs by giving the players who buy them more half baked packs. In other words milking them to the full capacity. Sure the prices will remain the same but the packs will be shallower, and become more superficial and half baked. That way if they used to make a profit of $4 from one player they are going to make $6 due to reduced cost.
So some people might ask what is the current quality?
An example is replacing a real bear with a costume! like this
Suppose bear was not in the game and they needed to add it but want to further lower the quality due to less sales they would have not made the costume but a bear statue instead! That what I am expecting to happen with future packs. The badly planned stuff to get worse.
While in other games this is how bear is done.
Lower it further?
It wouldn't surprise me unfortunately.
Me neither. It's essentially a stand off between EA and their customers. That's why the 'If Sims4 doesn't sell there won't be 5' comments. They knew people weren't happy with all the cuts.
I'm sure they didn't expect so many loyal customers to reach their personal limits this early on with TS4 and stop buying. They want to see more sales to 'justify' investing further in the base-whereas many of us want to see the premium base we've already paid for to be finished because we already paid! I'm not paying out twice because the studio couldn't manage their time or budget properly. Their mistake, not mine.
And if you support them further by buying the product, in hopes they will use the money to make it different/better, they take it to mean people are happy with what they're doing, so why change course? Catch 22 (for simmers).
@Erpe
Erpe Quote "In the 1980s almost all gamers were boys. At that time girls discussed why their boring boyfriends used so much time on something so boring as computers. But since then things have graduately changed. Most games have still most males among their fans. But even shooters, war games and sports games are now also more and more played by girls."
Erpe Above what you stated This is so untrue. We were in the arcades both male and female.Spend the day there. Every house I knew owned an atari. Both male and female. We just did not game for hours in home or on the go like kids do today. We liked to go outside and play not sit in front of a TV all day gaming.
@Erpe
Erpe Quote "In the 1980s almost all gamers were boys. At that time girls discussed why their boring boyfriends used so much time on something so boring as computers. But since then things have graduately changed. Most games have still most males among their fans. But even shooters, war games and sports games are now also more and more played by girls."
Erpe Above what you stated This is so untrue. We were in the arcades both male and female.Spend the day there. Every house I knew owned an atari. Both male and female. We just did not game for hours in home or on the go like kids do today. We liked to go outside and play not sit in front of a TV all day gaming.
Maybe. But some of the boys were computer freaks also in those days and used all their time on computers and gaming
I wasn't one of them though because I was too busy about finishing my studies and starting in my new job. So I didn't own a computer until I bought my first PC late in the 1980s. Earlier I only used computers for more serious matters when I studied computer science or later teach about it on Picoline computers which would have costed my about $6000 if I should have bought one for myself. You can see a picture of such a computer which I used for teaching in the late 1980s on https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hillebrandt_regnecentralen_rc759-piccoline.jpg
My first own computer was a 80386DX PC which only had an 80 MB harddisc when I bought it. I later expanded it with a 256 MB harddisc too and later again switched the original 80 MB to a 512 MB harddisc. The original 1 MB ram was also expanded to 4 MB so I also could install OS/2 v. 3 and have it running as a BBS while I also played games on it. Those were the days
@Erpe
Erpe Quote "In the 1980s almost all gamers were boys. At that time girls discussed why their boring boyfriends used so much time on something so boring as computers. But since then things have graduately changed. Most games have still most males among their fans. But even shooters, war games and sports games are now also more and more played by girls."
Erpe Above what you stated This is so untrue. We were in the arcades both male and female.Spend the day there. Every house I knew owned an atari. Both male and female. We just did not game for hours in home or on the go like kids do today. We liked to go outside and play not sit in front of a TV all day gaming.
Maybe. But some of the boys were computer freaks also in those days and used all their time on computers and gaming
I wasn't one of them though because I was too busy about finishing my studies and starting in my new job. So I didn't own a computer until I bought my first PC late in the 1980s. Earlier I only used computers for more serious matters when I studied computer science or later teach about it on Picoline computers which would have costed my about $6000 if I should have bought one for myself. You can see a picture of such a computer which I used for teaching in the late 1980s on https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hillebrandt_regnecentralen_rc759-piccoline.jpg
My first own computer was a 80386DX PC which only had an 80 MB harddisc when I bought it. I later expanded it with a 256 MB harddisc too and later again switched the original 80 MB to a 512 MB harddisc. The original 1 MB ram was also expanded to 4 MB so I also could install OS/2 v. 3 and have it running as a BBS while I also played games on it. Those were the days
When atari entered the home and arcades were big business no one I knew owned a computer.. I did not know anyone in the 80's that owned a computer in home. Not until windows 95 . Maybe things were different in your country
I just want to say something here.
We all know the game has too many problems. More than any previous sims game
The developers are very very slow in addressing the issues. And each pack released will add new problems.
With this slow pace do you think this game will ever be fixed to be in an acceptable condition?
I don't think so. I just feel TS4 is never going to make it. EA is not serious about it, maybe because they are making some profit, but what I know that the game is losing more supporters every day so this profit will sure going to take a hit.
When sales get less and less, then EA's only way is to lower the cost and quality of these packs further more in order to maximize the profit from the people who are buying. They will have to recover lost sales from the people who stopped buying the packs by giving the players who buy them more half baked packs. In other words milking them to the full capacity. Sure the prices will remain the same but the packs will be shallower, and become more superficial and half baked. That way if they used to make a profit of $4 from one player they are going to make $6 due to reduced cost.
So some people might ask what is the current quality?
An example is replacing a real bear with a costume! like this
Suppose bear was not in the game and they needed to add it but want to further lower the quality due to less sales they would have not made the costume but a bear statue instead! That what I am expecting to happen with future packs. The badly planned stuff to get worse.
While in other games this is how bear is done.
Lower it further?
It wouldn't surprise me unfortunately.
Me neither. It's essentially a stand off between EA and their customers. That's why the 'If Sims4 doesn't sell there won't be 5' comments. They knew people weren't happy with all the cuts.
I'm sure they didn't expect so many loyal customers to reach their personal limits this early on with TS4 and stop buying. They want to see more sales to 'justify' investing further in the base-whereas many of us want to see the premium base we've already paid for to be finished because we already paid! I'm not paying out twice because the studio couldn't manage their time or budget properly. Their mistake, not mine.
And if you support them further by buying the product, in hopes they will use the money to make it different/better, they take it to mean people are happy with what they're doing, so why change course? Catch 22 (for simmers).
Exactly right. Exactly why I'm here telling EA why I'm not buying. It's on them if they want to listen.
@Erpe
Erpe Quote "In the 1980s almost all gamers were boys. At that time girls discussed why their boring boyfriends used so much time on something so boring as computers. But since then things have graduately changed. Most games have still most males among their fans. But even shooters, war games and sports games are now also more and more played by girls."
Erpe Above what you stated This is so untrue. We were in the arcades both male and female.Spend the day there. Every house I knew owned an atari. Both male and female. We just did not game for hours in home or on the go like kids do today. We liked to go outside and play not sit in front of a TV all day gaming.
Totally with you @phoebebebe13 I think it was more a case of assuming it was male dominated because they were well catered for and it was a time when some backwards opinions about women still existed.
@Erpe
Erpe Quote "In the 1980s almost all gamers were boys. At that time girls discussed why their boring boyfriends used so much time on something so boring as computers. But since then things have graduately changed. Most games have still most males among their fans. But even shooters, war games and sports games are now also more and more played by girls."
Erpe Above what you stated This is so untrue. We were in the arcades both male and female.Spend the day there. Every house I knew owned an atari. Both male and female. We just did not game for hours in home or on the go like kids do today. We liked to go outside and play not sit in front of a TV all day gaming.
Totally with you @phoebebebe13 I think it was more a case of assuming it was male dominated because they were well catered for and it was a time when some backwards opinions about women still existed.
woman's lib did not come in until the 70's so that male dominate mentality was still going and it still goes on today in different ways. Girls are pink , boys a blue garbage. Even when it comes to kids toys. I knew a lot of girls that played with their brother's GI Joe's , had the boy version of the big wheel. Played with legos that is supposed to be a "boy" toy. When will they learn not all girls are girly .
Comments
I agree (I think). What I don't understand is why it feels like Maxis thinks women aren't as discriminating about games as are men.
To be honest, the whole gaming industry is going downhill. It is just really noticeable because of the type of game that The Sims is. I remember a few Call Of Duty's ago, I thought...wow, the campaign was so short. I finished it in a day. Well fast forward to Ghosts and I finished it in a few hours. And that has become the standard. Most games emphasize multi-player because that doesn't require as much work as a single player experience. Some games don't even offer a single player mode anymore. Don't get me started on the amount of videos we have to watch while we play.
I just remembered something funny. I bought a Commadore 64 for my sons in the early 80's and they had to type their games into it.
When I was about 10 I was listening to the news on the radio and heard them talk about things that were coming in the future and computers with screens that you could play games on was announced. I was so jealous because I would have been an adult by the time those computer games were available. Then I thought to myself - I don't care I'll play them anyway.
And I do.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuW44b3uCMtCSaq4gwC8EZg
Yeah, the Madden titles and Call of Duty are barely graphical buffs charged as if they were whole new games. You might as well call them over-priced DLC. AT LEAST they don't release a new game bereft of base features that were standard five years earlier...
I also got the vibe the sales were better than they expected based on their smug behaviour. It really saddens me somehow, because I'm sure the sims team got a normal budget for TS4 and just wasted half of it for the Olympus and seeing as they probably still got a fair amount of money out of it, I think next time EA will just give them half the budget from the get-go, because "sims fans just buy the plum anyway".
Just my personal opinion of course, I don't have any numbers to prove it.
The Essence
How To Lose Your Ugliness in Ten Generations
But the game is doing very good anyway and TS4 even was the best selling of all PC games in 2014 according to a source. We don't yet know how well it's expansions are selling though. But they probably have at least acceptable sales numbers because so many have the basegame. Teens who didn't play the previous Sims games aren't so critical about the game as we are because we compare it to all previous Sims games. I think that it is mainly in this comparison that TS4 fails to impress us.
Sorry was late getting back to you, but been off busy playing sims 2. On the gender thing, I been gaming before Windows PC was invented. Heck before we even had computers at home. Sims 1 was marketed for everyone, because it was totally new, there was no demographic, originally they didn't even know who to sell it to.
Everyone picked it up, because it was different, but right away it made a sensation because all the hidden women who they didn't know were playing games, picked Sims 1 up in significant numbers and then gaming companies knew there was a female market. (I'm female by the way) Most men I know who play computer games have some experience with Sims 1, they bought it, they enjoyed it, then got turned off by many expansion packs. Many of our top modders if you notice present themselves as men. (Pescado, Twallian, Zerbu etc..)
That brings me to simcity, and it's important. The Sims comes from simcity, simcity was built first, but the sims is just an expansion of the maxis simulation games they've always made (after Sim Ant, Sim Tower, Sim Farm etc). The orginal sim 1 game was actually about ants in fact. There was also a bridge game never released called Simsville and bits of it made it's way into sims 2. Simsville simulated at the level of neighbourhoods instead of towns (simcity) or people (The sims) Sim 2 actually gives you the ability to transfer sims into Simcity 4 and follow them and Simcity 4 allows you to build towns and transfer them into Sims 2 to live in. The games used to be linked and done by one set of developers called Maxis. LGR who plays all Maxis games has done a big overview the whole issue.
Now after Sim city 4, they released Sim Societies, it was totally different and did something different. The reviews were mixed, many fans did not buy and Sim city was stuck on the shelf for 10 years. Until Simcity 2013, which was a game awaited for many, many years. A persistent online connection which fans objected to (and EA refused to remove) hit the sales, had the fans deserting the game and left the follow up expansion on the shelf. Yep, you can buy Simcity (down from about $60 and now found in the bargain basement bin for around $5. If that's where Sims 4 is heading, then nope I don't call that doing well, the franchise will be in trouble. The modders have left, the online (as I hear) is deserted, but the new city skyline game has modders, fans, wonderful reviews galore, and people are raving about it's recent expansion even though they have patched the most important things for free. Maxis Redwood has been closed (the original maxis who have always been in charge of Simcity), their staff have been sacked and they are now making mods and asking for change on the Sky Line boards.
In a worrying sign for sims 4, some modders have also quit, leaving their mods unsupported, and watching youtube I am aware how many have quit, saying sims 4 just dosent have enough content and things to do. Again surprising for a game not even a year old, whilst I seeing more let's plays for sims 1 and sims 2.
I been tracking Sims 4, and since it released in September 2014, it has been at half price or less EVERY SINGLE MONTH. For a new released game, that's worrying. I wonder if that will happen to GTA 5, The Witcher, or Fallout 4 in a year. I find the development of Simcity very interesting, because watching the history of Simcity, Maxis and The Sims gives me a good idea where this franchise is heading. (spore is another good example from the past)
PS: Denmark's market is very different from what I'm seeing in the USA and the UK. It seems to be younger and more female focused. From what I can see around the internet, young girls are having a problem buying stuff for sims 4. The base game was too expensive and the expansions come round too quickly for them afford to keep up.
Guess I been around a long time, none of this is new, I can see when a company or franchise is having trouble and I know it's not optimism that will help it get through, rather the company better open it's ears and start listening very carefully to their customers
We all know the game has too many problems. More than any previous sims game
The developers are very very slow in addressing the issues. And each pack released will add new problems.
With this slow pace do you think this game will ever be fixed to be in an acceptable condition?
I don't think so. I just feel TS4 is never going to make it. EA is not serious about it, maybe because they are making some profit, but what I know that the game is losing more supporters every day so this profit will sure going to take a hit.
When sales get less and less, then EA's only way is to lower the cost and quality of these packs further more in order to maximize the profit from the people who are buying. They will have to recover lost sales from the people who stopped buying the packs by giving the players who buy them more half baked packs. In other words milking them to the full capacity. Sure the prices will remain the same but the packs will be shallower, and become more superficial and half baked. That way if they used to make a profit of $4 from one player they are going to make $6 due to reduced cost.
So some people might ask what is the current quality?
An example is replacing a real bear with a costume! like this
Suppose bear was not in the game and they needed to add it but want to further lower the quality due to less sales they would have not made the costume but a bear statue instead! That what I am expecting to happen with future packs. The badly planned stuff to get worse.
While in other games this is how bear is done.
This of course didn't completely stop girls from gaming too. But the most popular games at the time was war simulations and flight simulators from especially Microprose. Flighing dangerous missions over enemy territories and fighting head to head with enemy aircrafts while being shot on from the ground too wasn't the game's most girls would have preferred at the time. Playing a helicopter simulation like Gunship appealed also more to boys than to girls.
But there are always exceptions. Boxing is still mainly a male sport. But here in Denmark we have Anita Christensen who became a professional world champion in exactly boxing. I have read her biography where she explains how she always followed her big brother in everything. She played soccer with the boys in primary school and found all the girls in her class boring because they played with dolls which she had hated since her parents gave her a doll as a Christmas present while her big brother got cars, tractors and toy soldiers instead. She wanted the same toys as her big brother and she wanted to do the same activities as he did. This continued even when he and one of his friends about 17 years old joined a boxing club because then she did the same. She hadn't expected to get matches though. So she was very surprised when she was ask if she wanted that too. But she accepted and wasn't afraid at all because she had fought with both girls and boys all her life and attempted to learn everything from the boys. The girls in her class had attempted to mob, bully and tease her because she didn't care about them. But then she followed them after school and attacked them. This worked because they weren't used to physical fighting as she was.
The funny thing about Anita Christensen is that she also won a price as a model though. But she stopped modeling because she hated to wear dresses.
Women are now also soldiers in the real world. So maybe they also now are more interested in violent war games than they were in the 1989s and it seems that more and more females become boxers too. But in the beginning it was nearly impossible to find opponents for Anita Christensen. It probably didn't help either that she won all her fights easily because she knew about boxing technics. Her first opponents never knew anything and just tried to scare her which wasn't possible at all.
I am not sure how much difference there are between Denmark and other countries when it comes to teens playing Sims games because I think that teens aren't that different in different countries. A big difference between the English speaking world and the remaining part of Europe is how the adults view teens and rate games like the Sims because PEGI rated the Sims games as suitable for children too until the UK joined PEGI. The US and especially Australia don't think that children should play such games at all and therefore rate them as T or M games. (The M rating is from Australia.) Germany still rates the Sims games as suitable for all ages which Germany can do because Germany has its own USK rating system and doesn't use PEGI like nearly all other European countries do.
So maybe parents in the US don't like their teens to play Sims too much. But in Denmark and most of Europe parents would even help their 7 to 10 years old children to play the game.
SimCity has never been a game for me although I played the very first version when it was released in 1989 and a few year later too. It was interesting. But it wasn't my favorite at all. At that time I preferred games like M1 Tank Platoon from Microprose. I also liked Monkey Iland from LucasArts when it was released in 1990. Other games like Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, Colonization and Covert Action (all from Microprose) I played a lot too. Then there were the adventure games from Sierra, Accolade and similar companies. But only the very first version of SimCity has ever really interested me although I very shortly have attempted the later versions too. But I just found them rather boring. SimAnts I liked though. But it was a very small game.
Sims 1 never interested me when it was released because it looked like just a dollhouse game for girls. I saw that it got expansions too. But only the last EP Makin' Magic caught my interest. But when I saw the videos for TS2 I bought the game imediately and played it a lot for about two years. Then I became bored with extremely low difficulty degree and at the same time EA switched to the dreadful Securom copy protection. This was the end for TS2 for me.
TS1 I bought very discounted after I had played TS2 a lot just to see how TS1 was. I played it a little. But I found it to be too tiring even though a few things were interesting to explore.
SimCity 4 I used to make neighborhoods for TS2. But I never found anything interesting in SimCity 4 besides that.
Pregnancy rates alone may give you a little idea about how different teenagers can be. I think teens are all different dependent on where they come from. Some have more outside entertainments, some have less money. To say that all teenagers act just like Dutch one's seems strange to me.
From what I can see of girl teens in the UK, they aint interested in consoles and they aint intrested in PC's. What they love is their smart phones and they are more often seen playing things like kim kardashian thingy and Sims Freeplay. (limited personal experience) Heck, they don't even want a pc when we give them one for free.
Best selling of all PC games in 2014 is not saying much. It's like being the thinnest kid at fat camp.
Lower it further?
It wouldn't surprise me unfortunately.
The reason isn't that teens are less sexual active here at all. I actually think that quite the opposite is true. But even teens know everything about avoiding pregnancy here in Denmark because they learn about such things in school. So their parents aren't scared about unwanted pregnancies at all.
Teens and pretteens in Denmark haven't always the money to buy Sims games either. I could see that very clearly in the Sims 2 forum which they dominated. (Only one or two of them followed us later to the Sims 3 forum from where they also disappeared after some time.) But they found ways to get the games anyway. If nothing else worked they just persuaded their parents to give them Sims games both for their birthdays and for Christmas.
Me neither. It's essentially a stand off between EA and their customers. That's why the 'If Sims4 doesn't sell there won't be 5' comments. They knew people weren't happy with all the cuts.
I'm sure they didn't expect so many loyal customers to reach their personal limits this early on with TS4 and stop buying. They want to see more sales to 'justify' investing further in the base-whereas many of us want to see the premium base we've already paid for to be finished because we already paid! I'm not paying out twice because the studio couldn't manage their time or budget properly. Their mistake, not mine.
https://twitter.com/sparkfairy1
And if you support them further by buying the product, in hopes they will use the money to make it different/better, they take it to mean people are happy with what they're doing, so why change course? Catch 22 (for simmers).
Erpe Quote "In the 1980s almost all gamers were boys. At that time girls discussed why their boring boyfriends used so much time on something so boring as computers. But since then things have graduately changed. Most games have still most males among their fans. But even shooters, war games and sports games are now also more and more played by girls."
Erpe Above what you stated This is so untrue. We were in the arcades both male and female.Spend the day there. Every house I knew owned an atari. Both male and female. We just did not game for hours in home or on the go like kids do today. We liked to go outside and play not sit in front of a TV all day gaming.
I wasn't one of them though because I was too busy about finishing my studies and starting in my new job. So I didn't own a computer until I bought my first PC late in the 1980s. Earlier I only used computers for more serious matters when I studied computer science or later teach about it on Picoline computers which would have costed my about $6000 if I should have bought one for myself. You can see a picture of such a computer which I used for teaching in the late 1980s on https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hillebrandt_regnecentralen_rc759-piccoline.jpg
My first own computer was a 80386DX PC which only had an 80 MB harddisc when I bought it. I later expanded it with a 256 MB harddisc too and later again switched the original 80 MB to a 512 MB harddisc. The original 1 MB ram was also expanded to 4 MB so I also could install OS/2 v. 3 and have it running as a BBS while I also played games on it. Those were the days
When atari entered the home and arcades were big business no one I knew owned a computer.. I did not know anyone in the 80's that owned a computer in home. Not until windows 95 . Maybe things were different in your country
Exactly right. Exactly why I'm here telling EA why I'm not buying. It's on them if they want to listen.
https://twitter.com/sparkfairy1
Totally with you @phoebebebe13 I think it was more a case of assuming it was male dominated because they were well catered for and it was a time when some backwards opinions about women still existed.
https://twitter.com/sparkfairy1
woman's lib did not come in until the 70's so that male dominate mentality was still going and it still goes on today in different ways. Girls are pink , boys a blue garbage. Even when it comes to kids toys. I knew a lot of girls that played with their brother's GI Joe's , had the boy version of the big wheel. Played with legos that is supposed to be a "boy" toy. When will they learn not all girls are girly .