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New Expansion Pack announcement at Gamescom 2018?

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  • ErpeErpe Posts: 5,872 Member
    Nope, too soon!
    LiELF wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    jackjack_k wrote: »
    @Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    @catloverplayer The Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile didn’t fail! Actually they were the first mobile Sims games that didn’t fail like the mobile versions of TS2, TS3 and the Sims Medieval all did - and exactly because TSF and TSM were online multiplayer games! ;)

    I don’t know if TS5 will fail or not because we don’t know anything about it yet (except that it has been in development since 2014 and almost certainly is multiplayer). Most likely it will be very different from the earlier big Sims games but still get packs and DLC.

    But I know that the small group of hardcore veteran simmers (maybe about a thousand?) in this forum are hard to convince because they just refuse the fact that they aren’t even in the target group for the big Sims games which instead are the millions of new young casual simmers who buy the huge majority of the games. (Therefore the gurus ignore this forum and use twitter instead.)

    Neither of those games are multiplayer, at least not in any way that would qualify a PC game as multiplayer. Both of those games are also free to install, and for the most part free to play.

    EA tried multiplayer with this game and it didn’t work out. I don’t know why you are basing your prediction for the sequel on mobile games, or a speculative “new group of casual simmers“. You don’t know who is installing those apps, or buying this game; for all you know there could be considerable overlap.
    EA tried rain and weather in the Sims 2 basegame. But it didn’t work out. The game became unstable and it was raining inside the houses. So EA just gave up and decided never to include weather in the Sims games, right?

    We all know that this wasn’t what happened. EA planned multiplayer for TS4 and for SimCity 2013. But when SimCity 2013 was released EA saw that multiplayer had been made in the wrong way and there wasn’t enough time to make it better in TS4. Therefore TS4 didn’t become a multiplayer game anyway. But EA then gave up and removed multiplayer from all its PC games? No, of course not! Instead EA began making TS5 and give it an improved multiplayer part that didn’t have the same problems.

    There are a huge number of ways to make multiplayer games and I don’t understand why it isn’t multiplayer when I am visiting cities belonging to my friends in the Sims Freeplay or let my sims become friends with sims that are owned by other simmers in any of the two mobile games??

    The two mobile games aren’t identical and in the Sims Mobile we can’t even visit cities belonging to other simmers as we can in Freeplay. TS5 will likely have multiplayer in a third way which I can’t guess yet. Maybe we can visit cities belonging to other simmers or maybe we can’t. Maybe we can invite sims belonging to other simmers like in the Sims Mobile. Maybe TS5 will be real-time too even though I doubt it. Maybe TS5 will require an Internet connection all the time or maybe it like so many multiplayer games can be played offline too. We just don’t know yet. But that EA should throw millions of dollars away by ignoring the huge minority of new young simmers just to please a few thousand older veteran simmers who want packs for TS4 in at least 20 more years isn’t within the real world no matter how hard you fight to convince me that EA care more about veteran simmers than about money ;):D

    There is no Sims 5. Please stop spreading information that there is. Until they confirm it, it’s not coming. Grant has already replied to people on Twitter than TS5 isn’t coming.
    Don’t lie! Grant has instead been very careful not to say anything about TS5 at all!

    The only time he ever has mentioned TS5 was when somebody asked him if the EPs he plans making are for TS5? Then he answered “No, they are for TS4.” But once more he just omitted the natural continuation which of course would have been ”..because TS5 won’t be released for a couple of years.” So don’t lie! Just because EA hasn’t yet told us which Sims games EA will release in the future this doesn’t mean that EA has said that they never ever will release a new Sims game again!
    And the majority of new Simmers have also disliked the idea of online. There have been several polls on various sites with people saying they don’t want an online game.
    Nevertheless EA released both the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile anyway!

    There had also been several polls that showed that TS1 simmers didn’t want TS2 because they wanted more EPs for TS1 instead. But EA released TS2 anyway and I still remember how extremely angry almost all TS1 became.

    Then it became the Sims 2 simmers who hated the idea about TS3 and wanted many more EPs for TS2. But EA just released TS3 after 5 years anyway.

    Then it became the Sims 3 simmers who hated the idea about TS4 and many of them still refuse to play TS4 at all. But after 5 years EA released TS4 anyway.

    Now (for the fourth time) the current simmers (who now play TS4) hate the idea about TS5 and demand more EPs for TS4 instead. But for the fourth time they won’t be able to stop EA from announcing and releasing TS5 which likely again has been in development since 2014.

    The only thing that is new is that the Sims 4 simmers seem to have been able to make EA release more packs even after the release of TS5 which shows me that TS5 must be an online multiplayer game because such games usually have a much longer life than offline games have. (World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and still get new content now 14 years later.)

    So no! I don’t doubt that TS5 is about to be announced this summer. You may be right that most Sims 4 simmers won’t like it and won’t buy it very soon because EA seems to expect that too. But it will be the game for all the young new simmers who now only have the mobile Sims games to play.

    What I am most curious about is if EA really wants TS5 be based on subscriptions in a way similar to how World of Warcraft works? EA Access could be used for that. But exactly how EA will do it we just don’t know yet.

    Ask yourself why Grant so many times just has repeated that TS4 isn’t dead and still has a lot of planned content when he instead just could have said: “We are not ready to switch to Sims 5 for at least a couple more years. So don’t worry about TS4! It will still be our main Sims games for more years!” Why was it so important for him not to say that and to avoid mentioning TS5 at all??

    I think one of the problems here is that you keep reading Grant's quote in the wrong context. Maybe it's a language barrier, maybe it's just errant reading comprehension, but to clarify:

    A person on Twitter asked:
    "When you say a potential future pack, do you mean like for The Sims 5?"

    To which Grant replied:
    "No. Focused on Sims 4."

    I notice that when you repeat his answer, you put a comma between "no" and "focused", making his answer one sentence and assuming a deflected answer. This is incorrect. He first answered, "No." Period. As in, "No, I do NOT mean a potential future pack for Sims 5." Then he added, "Focused on Sims 4." As in, "Potential future pack ONLY for Sims 4." His sentence structure made his meaning perfectly clear. It has nothing to do with "wishful thinking" or interpretation.
    You are not remembering his tweets correctly and we can’t discuss this further without finding those tweets to see their exact wording. But he had to repeat many times that TS4 isn’t over and that he still plans to make a lot of more packs for TS4. In the end he even did something as unusual as to talk about packs “for years” even though EA never has done something like that before because EA usually doesn’t allow the devs to talk about unannouced packs at all!
    Also, I don't understand why you expect him to say anything that implies "Sims 5 in a few years" because that was not the question asked, nor has there been any implication whatsoever of even a hint to Sims 5 existing at all. If anything, his firm answer regarding development focus on Sims 4 for years to come, does more to imply that Sims 5 is nowhere near completion, if it's even being developed at all.
    I can’t explain that further without bringing maybe about 20 tweets where he again and again answered questions that were motivated by people’s curiosity about TS4’s future now where TS5 maybe could be announced.
    Furthermore, it doesn't seem to occur to you that your theory about EA "needing a new Sims game every five years because new young simmers can't buy all of the packs to a full game and they are the most important customers" might be completely wrong. Especially when all evidence currently points to the fact that Sims 4 is doing extremely well with sales and is, in fact, growing its player base and new Simmers are joining in on Sims 4 just fine. Which is why EA has decided to have the devs be more active on Twitter, (a social media network popular to younger generations), to engage the new generation of Simmers and to promote The Sims 4 and the new Seasons expansion. Remember, Seasons was only announced one month before its release date, which is very different from how EPs were handled before. So EA has decided on a new strategy to use twitter to market the expansions in a shorter time period. EA is also now interested in what these new Simmers want for Sims 4, so Grant, the lead producer, is taking polls and suggestions in order to continue full speed ahead with years more of development. Grant even stated it himself that they are indeed planning Sims 4 content for years to come. This is not "wishful thinking", this is actual factual statements from the lead producer himself.

    You ask why the devs have suddenly appeared on Twitter but you keep avoiding the most obvious answer: EA wants to continue to market Sims 4 to new Simmers because that's where the money is. Things are different for this era of The Sims. The game hasn't even reached its peak yet, but it is gaining momentum and more players join every day. There are brand new EA programs for Game Changers and there's Fan Kits now, and merchandise, and Sims 4 is more sensationalized than ever. This is Sims 4 in its heyday and there is no room for Sims 5 right now. It might be in development but it's very unlikely to be anywhere near ready to release. And if it were, It would only bring competition to its own profits, which is bad business. EA wouldn't risk releasing a competitor and dividing its own fanbase by making them choose which game to support. If you think parents have trouble buying their kids a Sims game with lots of extra packs, why in the world then, would they support two Sims games with lots of packs? By your own logic, the parents wouldn't support it. Especially if their young Simmer was already invested in the first game.

    There is more evidence against Sims 5 coming out anytime soon than there is to justify it's existence. It would be a bad business move by EA and they wouldn't compete with their own game in its prime, no matter how different the "new" model is. If anything, that is wishful thinking.
    It seems that I can’t convince people that EA just doesn’t want to lose millions of new simmers who would be forced to only play free mobile Sims games for years if EA didn’t release a new big PC Sims game for them.

    The interesting question is for me instead why EA released the Sims Mobile when EA already had the Sims Freeplay? People expected the Sims Mobile to replace Freeplay. But this doesn’t seem to be EA’s plan at all. Also the Sims Mobile is an extremely small and repetitive game where you only play 2-4 adult sims in one house and do almost the same quests over and over. So I actually doubt that simmers will play it for years like they have done with the Sims Freeplay. Therefore I now suspect EA to have planned the Sims Mobile mostly just as an introduction for the next big Sims game.
  • drake_mccartydrake_mccarty Posts: 6,114 Member
    Nope, too soon!
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    @Erpe "Also the reason why people kept asking about TS4 being over was because they expected TS5 soon to be announced and therefore doubted that TS4 really would get many more packs."

    No, this wasn't the reason. It's because of the panic that ensued when a previous Guru on Reddit claimed that there was no development on The Sims 5 and that EA was shifting The Sims towards mobile. The natural assumption was that the game was ending. It didn't help that during that time, several gurus were fired, some were moved to mobile and EA wasn't communicating with us due to not having a community manager. That's when Graham stepped in to calm things down, and eventually Grant.
    The Reddit message was obviously from a simmer and not from a former guru! That was easy to see by the way it was written. So I doubt that this false message really created much panic.

    Also it would have been much easier for Grant and the gurus to just state that the reddit message was false instead of writing a huge number of messages on twitter about TS4 still getting a lot more new content (and even for years).

    But the gurus had to make simmers believe that TS4 isn’t over when TS5 (or what it will be called) soon will be announced. The problem wasn’t mainly the hardcore simmers in this forum though but the millions of casual simmers elsewhere. Therefore the gurus went on twitter to prepare all those simmers for the announcement of a new big Sims game hoping that they then would spread the information that TS4 isn’t over anyway.

    If you were online at all during that time, you would know that the message did create much panic. But it wasn't just the message alone, it was a combination of things.

    Maybe they didn't state that it was false because it wasn't? If you check the Reddit user's history, you'll see that he had some inside knowledge about the game. I believe him.

    All I can say is, start preparing those excuses you're going to need when The Sims 5 does not get announced. :*

    I don’t know exactly why he suddenly wrote that he was a former SimGuru. But it wasn’t true. He was just a long time fan of the Sims game instead (and maybe felt that he knew enough about the Sims games to see himself as some kind of guru).

    So basically what you’ve been doing here? I mean, you sure like to talk a lot about EA’s future plans for The Sims like you were in the room and know what’s going on behind the scenes.
    So you too think that EA just makes decisions at random and plans to just throw hundreds of millions of dollars away by switching it’s very profitable PC Sims games out with the much less profitable mobile Sims games ;):D

    EA has made many mobile Sims games earlier and also some Sims games for consoles. But before the Sims Freeplay and TS4 those Sims games for other platforms earned so little money that EA soon withdraw them from the market while all the PC Sims games earned huge profit to EA (and especially from all the extra packs that EA released).

    Mobile games similar to the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile are made by many other game companies too. But those game companies usually also release them in version for PCs because this is very cheap to do and increases their income. But EA only release the Sims Freeplay for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, WebOS, BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone. That is a lot of platforms. But where are the versions for Mac and Windows PC? Those PC versions would cost almost nothing to make. But EA wouldn’t make them because EA feared that they then would steal customers from the many times more profitable Sims 3 and Sims 4 games and packs!

    So no. You can’t convince me that EA cares so little about losing hundreds of millions of dollars by switching from the many times more profitable PC platforms to the many times less profitable mobile platforms (even though EA now finally have found a way to earn just a little profit from mobile Sims games too)! The PC platform is still the most profitable platform ever even though EA now has found a way to make packs too for a console port of the PC game and thus earn money that way too.

    I’ve actually never said that.

    I’m kind of going to gloss over most of this post, because you have made a huge error in your second paragraph. More specifically in your statement regarding the mobile games; there were a total of 5 Sims titles developed and released for iOS (TS3, TS3:World Adventures, TS3:Ambitions, TS: Medieval, and TS: Freeplay) between 2009 and 2011. The paid apps were not removed from the iOS AppStore until 2015, a year after The Sims 4 released on PC. I don’t know what you consider to be “soon”, but 4-6 years is a significant chunk of time to bring in money. Because, again, 4 of those 5 games cost money to even download and also featured micro transactions for additional in-game content. If those apps were not making enough money to be of any value to EA they would have pulled them, but instead they made more... because they were more profitable than you think. Do they make PC scale money? No, but no one has said they did. PC Sims makes nothing compared to other EA owned franchises, but that hasn’t stopped them from making more Sims games has it?
    I bought those mobile games out of curiosity because I actually loved both the Sims 3 World Adventures and the Sims Medieval in the PC versions. So I also tried several times to get into the mobile versions of those games (and also the Sims 3 for iOS). But I never managed to. All those games were boring in the mobile versions and only sold a little because simmers loved the PC versions and therefore wanted to try the mobile versions too.

    Paid mobile games don’t always have short lives. An example is Plague Inc which was released as a paid game for iOS 3 years ago but still is on the top 3 list for paid iOS games. But the problem with all the paid mobile Sims games has always been that they were just hugely simplified versions of the PC games and also very different even though they were given the same names to make simmers think that they maybe were worth buying - which they usually weren’t.

    The Sims Medieval was actually also released for Windows Phone but as late as 2013. But both Medieval and the 3 mobile Sims 3 games sold so little that they soon were withdrawn from the app stores - and without EA ever releasing a mobile version of TS4 anyway!

    I don’t know if EA really lost money on those mobile games. But EA surely didn’t earn much money on them either. So now EA doesn’t make paid games for mobile devices anymore.

    The console games had about the same problem until EA found a way to port TS4 and its packs to consoles and not just make simplified Sims games without packs for consoles too.

    Windows phone was an utter failure, don’t base anything on that or it’s app sales/performance. Console gets packs because of their design, which is better than what previous console hardware could handle. It has absolutely nothing to do with EA figuring out how to do it, it was on Sony/Microsoft.

    Do you have app sales data? You can’t speak to the performance of any of those apps because you don’t actually know. Stop making up facts and presenting them in this argument, it’s not working out there way you are hoping.
  • ErpeErpe Posts: 5,872 Member
    Nope, too soon!
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    @Erpe "Also the reason why people kept asking about TS4 being over was because they expected TS5 soon to be announced and therefore doubted that TS4 really would get many more packs."

    No, this wasn't the reason. It's because of the panic that ensued when a previous Guru on Reddit claimed that there was no development on The Sims 5 and that EA was shifting The Sims towards mobile. The natural assumption was that the game was ending. It didn't help that during that time, several gurus were fired, some were moved to mobile and EA wasn't communicating with us due to not having a community manager. That's when Graham stepped in to calm things down, and eventually Grant.
    The Reddit message was obviously from a simmer and not from a former guru! That was easy to see by the way it was written. So I doubt that this false message really created much panic.

    Also it would have been much easier for Grant and the gurus to just state that the reddit message was false instead of writing a huge number of messages on twitter about TS4 still getting a lot more new content (and even for years).

    But the gurus had to make simmers believe that TS4 isn’t over when TS5 (or what it will be called) soon will be announced. The problem wasn’t mainly the hardcore simmers in this forum though but the millions of casual simmers elsewhere. Therefore the gurus went on twitter to prepare all those simmers for the announcement of a new big Sims game hoping that they then would spread the information that TS4 isn’t over anyway.

    If you were online at all during that time, you would know that the message did create much panic. But it wasn't just the message alone, it was a combination of things.

    Maybe they didn't state that it was false because it wasn't? If you check the Reddit user's history, you'll see that he had some inside knowledge about the game. I believe him.

    All I can say is, start preparing those excuses you're going to need when The Sims 5 does not get announced. :*

    I don’t know exactly why he suddenly wrote that he was a former SimGuru. But it wasn’t true. He was just a long time fan of the Sims game instead (and maybe felt that he knew enough about the Sims games to see himself as some kind of guru).

    So basically what you’ve been doing here? I mean, you sure like to talk a lot about EA’s future plans for The Sims like you were in the room and know what’s going on behind the scenes.
    So you too think that EA just makes decisions at random and plans to just throw hundreds of millions of dollars away by switching it’s very profitable PC Sims games out with the much less profitable mobile Sims games ;):D

    EA has made many mobile Sims games earlier and also some Sims games for consoles. But before the Sims Freeplay and TS4 those Sims games for other platforms earned so little money that EA soon withdraw them from the market while all the PC Sims games earned huge profit to EA (and especially from all the extra packs that EA released).

    Mobile games similar to the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile are made by many other game companies too. But those game companies usually also release them in version for PCs because this is very cheap to do and increases their income. But EA only release the Sims Freeplay for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, WebOS, BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone. That is a lot of platforms. But where are the versions for Mac and Windows PC? Those PC versions would cost almost nothing to make. But EA wouldn’t make them because EA feared that they then would steal customers from the many times more profitable Sims 3 and Sims 4 games and packs!

    So no. You can’t convince me that EA cares so little about losing hundreds of millions of dollars by switching from the many times more profitable PC platforms to the many times less profitable mobile platforms (even though EA now finally have found a way to earn just a little profit from mobile Sims games too)! The PC platform is still the most profitable platform ever even though EA now has found a way to make packs too for a console port of the PC game and thus earn money that way too.

    I’ve actually never said that.

    I’m kind of going to gloss over most of this post, because you have made a huge error in your second paragraph. More specifically in your statement regarding the mobile games; there were a total of 5 Sims titles developed and released for iOS (TS3, TS3:World Adventures, TS3:Ambitions, TS: Medieval, and TS: Freeplay) between 2009 and 2011. The paid apps were not removed from the iOS AppStore until 2015, a year after The Sims 4 released on PC. I don’t know what you consider to be “soon”, but 4-6 years is a significant chunk of time to bring in money. Because, again, 4 of those 5 games cost money to even download and also featured micro transactions for additional in-game content. If those apps were not making enough money to be of any value to EA they would have pulled them, but instead they made more... because they were more profitable than you think. Do they make PC scale money? No, but no one has said they did. PC Sims makes nothing compared to other EA owned franchises, but that hasn’t stopped them from making more Sims games has it?
    I bought those mobile games out of curiosity because I actually loved both the Sims 3 World Adventures and the Sims Medieval in the PC versions. So I also tried several times to get into the mobile versions of those games (and also the Sims 3 for iOS). But I never managed to. All those games were boring in the mobile versions and only sold a little because simmers loved the PC versions and therefore wanted to try the mobile versions too.

    Paid mobile games don’t always have short lives. An example is Plague Inc which was released as a paid game for iOS 3 years ago but still is on the top 3 list for paid iOS games. But the problem with all the paid mobile Sims games has always been that they were just hugely simplified versions of the PC games and also very different even though they were given the same names to make simmers think that they maybe were worth buying - which they usually weren’t.

    The Sims Medieval was actually also released for Windows Phone but as late as 2013. But both Medieval and the 3 mobile Sims 3 games sold so little that they soon were withdrawn from the app stores - and without EA ever releasing a mobile version of TS4 anyway!

    I don’t know if EA really lost money on those mobile games. But EA surely didn’t earn much money on them either. So now EA doesn’t make paid games for mobile devices anymore.

    The console games had about the same problem until EA found a way to port TS4 and its packs to consoles and not just make simplified Sims games without packs for consoles too.

    Windows phone was an utter failure, don’t base anything on that or it’s app sales/performance. Console gets packs because of their design, which is better than what previous console hardware could handle. It has absolutely nothing to do with EA figuring out how to do it, it was on Sony/Microsoft.
    No, it was Blind Squirrel Games who developed a new technic to port PC games to consoles. This got EA interested and at a very late state of TS4’s development EA therefore negotiated with BSG to let them port TS4 to consoles:

    Do you have app sales data? You can’t speak to the performance of any of those apps because you don’t actually know. Stop making up facts and presenting them in this argument, it’s not working out there way you are hoping.
    No, I don’t have the app sales data. But unlike you I don’t think that EA just makes decisions at random and promote bad selling games or stops making well selling games. But you seem to think that the decisions to not make a paid mobile version of TS4 and not making a simplified console version already in 2014 were just taken by throwing a dice a couple of times ;)
  • drake_mccartydrake_mccarty Posts: 6,114 Member
    edited June 2018
    Nope, too soon!
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    @Erpe "Also the reason why people kept asking about TS4 being over was because they expected TS5 soon to be announced and therefore doubted that TS4 really would get many more packs."

    No, this wasn't the reason. It's because of the panic that ensued when a previous Guru on Reddit claimed that there was no development on The Sims 5 and that EA was shifting The Sims towards mobile. The natural assumption was that the game was ending. It didn't help that during that time, several gurus were fired, some were moved to mobile and EA wasn't communicating with us due to not having a community manager. That's when Graham stepped in to calm things down, and eventually Grant.
    The Reddit message was obviously from a simmer and not from a former guru! That was easy to see by the way it was written. So I doubt that this false message really created much panic.

    Also it would have been much easier for Grant and the gurus to just state that the reddit message was false instead of writing a huge number of messages on twitter about TS4 still getting a lot more new content (and even for years).

    But the gurus had to make simmers believe that TS4 isn’t over when TS5 (or what it will be called) soon will be announced. The problem wasn’t mainly the hardcore simmers in this forum though but the millions of casual simmers elsewhere. Therefore the gurus went on twitter to prepare all those simmers for the announcement of a new big Sims game hoping that they then would spread the information that TS4 isn’t over anyway.

    If you were online at all during that time, you would know that the message did create much panic. But it wasn't just the message alone, it was a combination of things.

    Maybe they didn't state that it was false because it wasn't? If you check the Reddit user's history, you'll see that he had some inside knowledge about the game. I believe him.

    All I can say is, start preparing those excuses you're going to need when The Sims 5 does not get announced. :*

    I don’t know exactly why he suddenly wrote that he was a former SimGuru. But it wasn’t true. He was just a long time fan of the Sims game instead (and maybe felt that he knew enough about the Sims games to see himself as some kind of guru).

    So basically what you’ve been doing here? I mean, you sure like to talk a lot about EA’s future plans for The Sims like you were in the room and know what’s going on behind the scenes.
    So you too think that EA just makes decisions at random and plans to just throw hundreds of millions of dollars away by switching it’s very profitable PC Sims games out with the much less profitable mobile Sims games ;):D

    EA has made many mobile Sims games earlier and also some Sims games for consoles. But before the Sims Freeplay and TS4 those Sims games for other platforms earned so little money that EA soon withdraw them from the market while all the PC Sims games earned huge profit to EA (and especially from all the extra packs that EA released).

    Mobile games similar to the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile are made by many other game companies too. But those game companies usually also release them in version for PCs because this is very cheap to do and increases their income. But EA only release the Sims Freeplay for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, WebOS, BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone. That is a lot of platforms. But where are the versions for Mac and Windows PC? Those PC versions would cost almost nothing to make. But EA wouldn’t make them because EA feared that they then would steal customers from the many times more profitable Sims 3 and Sims 4 games and packs!

    So no. You can’t convince me that EA cares so little about losing hundreds of millions of dollars by switching from the many times more profitable PC platforms to the many times less profitable mobile platforms (even though EA now finally have found a way to earn just a little profit from mobile Sims games too)! The PC platform is still the most profitable platform ever even though EA now has found a way to make packs too for a console port of the PC game and thus earn money that way too.

    I’ve actually never said that.

    I’m kind of going to gloss over most of this post, because you have made a huge error in your second paragraph. More specifically in your statement regarding the mobile games; there were a total of 5 Sims titles developed and released for iOS (TS3, TS3:World Adventures, TS3:Ambitions, TS: Medieval, and TS: Freeplay) between 2009 and 2011. The paid apps were not removed from the iOS AppStore until 2015, a year after The Sims 4 released on PC. I don’t know what you consider to be “soon”, but 4-6 years is a significant chunk of time to bring in money. Because, again, 4 of those 5 games cost money to even download and also featured micro transactions for additional in-game content. If those apps were not making enough money to be of any value to EA they would have pulled them, but instead they made more... because they were more profitable than you think. Do they make PC scale money? No, but no one has said they did. PC Sims makes nothing compared to other EA owned franchises, but that hasn’t stopped them from making more Sims games has it?
    I bought those mobile games out of curiosity because I actually loved both the Sims 3 World Adventures and the Sims Medieval in the PC versions. So I also tried several times to get into the mobile versions of those games (and also the Sims 3 for iOS). But I never managed to. All those games were boring in the mobile versions and only sold a little because simmers loved the PC versions and therefore wanted to try the mobile versions too.

    Paid mobile games don’t always have short lives. An example is Plague Inc which was released as a paid game for iOS 3 years ago but still is on the top 3 list for paid iOS games. But the problem with all the paid mobile Sims games has always been that they were just hugely simplified versions of the PC games and also very different even though they were given the same names to make simmers think that they maybe were worth buying - which they usually weren’t.

    The Sims Medieval was actually also released for Windows Phone but as late as 2013. But both Medieval and the 3 mobile Sims 3 games sold so little that they soon were withdrawn from the app stores - and without EA ever releasing a mobile version of TS4 anyway!

    I don’t know if EA really lost money on those mobile games. But EA surely didn’t earn much money on them either. So now EA doesn’t make paid games for mobile devices anymore.

    The console games had about the same problem until EA found a way to port TS4 and its packs to consoles and not just make simplified Sims games without packs for consoles too.

    Windows phone was an utter failure, don’t base anything on that or it’s app sales/performance. Console gets packs because of their design, which is better than what previous console hardware could handle. It has absolutely nothing to do with EA figuring out how to do it, it was on Sony/Microsoft.
    No, it was Blind Squirrel Games who developed a new technic to port PC games to consoles. This got EA interested and at a very late state of TS4’s development EA therefore negotiated with BSG to let them port TS4 to consoles:

    Do you have app sales data? You can’t speak to the performance of any of those apps because you don’t actually know. Stop making up facts and presenting them in this argument, it’s not working out there way you are hoping.
    No, I don’t have the app sales data. But unlike you I don’t think that EA just makes decisions at random and promote bad selling games or stops making well selling games. But you seem to think that the decisions to not make a paid mobile version of TS4 and not making a simplified console version already in 2014 were just taken by throwing a dice a couple of times ;)

    Erpe just stop now. The studio porting games to console was contracted by EA for the sole purpose of porting the games to console. The Sims is EA property, no one is authorized to do anything with it unless they are contracted by EA to do so. Also, porting games is not a new technique - it’s done for all kinds of games on all kinds of platforms. Why didn’t PS3/XB360 get ‘packs’? Because the systems themselves could not handle the full PC game, let alone full downloadable content packs. The current generation of consoles are more capable in that regard, and as such can handle the full game and it’s subsequent releases.

    Also I have already reiterated that you are making assumptions on my thinking with things that only you have said. Of course EA doesn’t do things at random, that isn’t how it works. Paid apps are not the current trend, free-to-play are. Why would EA utilize a business model from nearly 10 years ago when the newer model is more profitable and sustainable in the long run? Again, that only pertains to mobile games. PC games do not work with the freemium business model unless they are upscaled mobile games which The Sims 4 is not. You just admitted that you have no sales data, so how can you continue to say the mobile apps were “bad selling games”? You have no information on that; you said that yourself, so instead of making (objectively bad) assumptions try using a little bit of logic there. Bad selling things do not get made multiple times. A non-successful paid mobile app wouldn’t spawn 3 additional unique versions. Until you have some factual, relevant information you don’t need to respond.
  • ErpeErpe Posts: 5,872 Member
    Nope, too soon!
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    @Erpe "Also the reason why people kept asking about TS4 being over was because they expected TS5 soon to be announced and therefore doubted that TS4 really would get many more packs."

    No, this wasn't the reason. It's because of the panic that ensued when a previous Guru on Reddit claimed that there was no development on The Sims 5 and that EA was shifting The Sims towards mobile. The natural assumption was that the game was ending. It didn't help that during that time, several gurus were fired, some were moved to mobile and EA wasn't communicating with us due to not having a community manager. That's when Graham stepped in to calm things down, and eventually Grant.
    The Reddit message was obviously from a simmer and not from a former guru! That was easy to see by the way it was written. So I doubt that this false message really created much panic.

    Also it would have been much easier for Grant and the gurus to just state that the reddit message was false instead of writing a huge number of messages on twitter about TS4 still getting a lot more new content (and even for years).

    But the gurus had to make simmers believe that TS4 isn’t over when TS5 (or what it will be called) soon will be announced. The problem wasn’t mainly the hardcore simmers in this forum though but the millions of casual simmers elsewhere. Therefore the gurus went on twitter to prepare all those simmers for the announcement of a new big Sims game hoping that they then would spread the information that TS4 isn’t over anyway.

    If you were online at all during that time, you would know that the message did create much panic. But it wasn't just the message alone, it was a combination of things.

    Maybe they didn't state that it was false because it wasn't? If you check the Reddit user's history, you'll see that he had some inside knowledge about the game. I believe him.

    All I can say is, start preparing those excuses you're going to need when The Sims 5 does not get announced. :*

    I don’t know exactly why he suddenly wrote that he was a former SimGuru. But it wasn’t true. He was just a long time fan of the Sims game instead (and maybe felt that he knew enough about the Sims games to see himself as some kind of guru).

    So basically what you’ve been doing here? I mean, you sure like to talk a lot about EA’s future plans for The Sims like you were in the room and know what’s going on behind the scenes.
    So you too think that EA just makes decisions at random and plans to just throw hundreds of millions of dollars away by switching it’s very profitable PC Sims games out with the much less profitable mobile Sims games ;):D

    EA has made many mobile Sims games earlier and also some Sims games for consoles. But before the Sims Freeplay and TS4 those Sims games for other platforms earned so little money that EA soon withdraw them from the market while all the PC Sims games earned huge profit to EA (and especially from all the extra packs that EA released).

    Mobile games similar to the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile are made by many other game companies too. But those game companies usually also release them in version for PCs because this is very cheap to do and increases their income. But EA only release the Sims Freeplay for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, WebOS, BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone. That is a lot of platforms. But where are the versions for Mac and Windows PC? Those PC versions would cost almost nothing to make. But EA wouldn’t make them because EA feared that they then would steal customers from the many times more profitable Sims 3 and Sims 4 games and packs!

    So no. You can’t convince me that EA cares so little about losing hundreds of millions of dollars by switching from the many times more profitable PC platforms to the many times less profitable mobile platforms (even though EA now finally have found a way to earn just a little profit from mobile Sims games too)! The PC platform is still the most profitable platform ever even though EA now has found a way to make packs too for a console port of the PC game and thus earn money that way too.

    I’ve actually never said that.

    I’m kind of going to gloss over most of this post, because you have made a huge error in your second paragraph. More specifically in your statement regarding the mobile games; there were a total of 5 Sims titles developed and released for iOS (TS3, TS3:World Adventures, TS3:Ambitions, TS: Medieval, and TS: Freeplay) between 2009 and 2011. The paid apps were not removed from the iOS AppStore until 2015, a year after The Sims 4 released on PC. I don’t know what you consider to be “soon”, but 4-6 years is a significant chunk of time to bring in money. Because, again, 4 of those 5 games cost money to even download and also featured micro transactions for additional in-game content. If those apps were not making enough money to be of any value to EA they would have pulled them, but instead they made more... because they were more profitable than you think. Do they make PC scale money? No, but no one has said they did. PC Sims makes nothing compared to other EA owned franchises, but that hasn’t stopped them from making more Sims games has it?
    I bought those mobile games out of curiosity because I actually loved both the Sims 3 World Adventures and the Sims Medieval in the PC versions. So I also tried several times to get into the mobile versions of those games (and also the Sims 3 for iOS). But I never managed to. All those games were boring in the mobile versions and only sold a little because simmers loved the PC versions and therefore wanted to try the mobile versions too.

    Paid mobile games don’t always have short lives. An example is Plague Inc which was released as a paid game for iOS 3 years ago but still is on the top 3 list for paid iOS games. But the problem with all the paid mobile Sims games has always been that they were just hugely simplified versions of the PC games and also very different even though they were given the same names to make simmers think that they maybe were worth buying - which they usually weren’t.

    The Sims Medieval was actually also released for Windows Phone but as late as 2013. But both Medieval and the 3 mobile Sims 3 games sold so little that they soon were withdrawn from the app stores - and without EA ever releasing a mobile version of TS4 anyway!

    I don’t know if EA really lost money on those mobile games. But EA surely didn’t earn much money on them either. So now EA doesn’t make paid games for mobile devices anymore.

    The console games had about the same problem until EA found a way to port TS4 and its packs to consoles and not just make simplified Sims games without packs for consoles too.

    Windows phone was an utter failure, don’t base anything on that or it’s app sales/performance. Console gets packs because of their design, which is better than what previous console hardware could handle. It has absolutely nothing to do with EA figuring out how to do it, it was on Sony/Microsoft.
    No, it was Blind Squirrel Games who developed a new technic to port PC games to consoles. This got EA interested and at a very late state of TS4’s development EA therefore negotiated with BSG to let them port TS4 to consoles:

    Do you have app sales data? You can’t speak to the performance of any of those apps because you don’t actually know. Stop making up facts and presenting them in this argument, it’s not working out there way you are hoping.
    No, I don’t have the app sales data. But unlike you I don’t think that EA just makes decisions at random and promote bad selling games or stops making well selling games. But you seem to think that the decisions to not make a paid mobile version of TS4 and not making a simplified console version already in 2014 were just taken by throwing a dice a couple of times ;)

    Erpe just stop now. The studio porting games to console was contracted by EA for the sole purpose of porting the games to console. The Sims is EA property, no one is authorized to do anything with it unless they are contracted by EA to do so. Also, porting games is not a new technique - it’s done for all kinds of games on all kinds of platforms. Why didn’t PS3/XB360 get ‘packs’? Because the systems themselves could not handle the full PC game, let alone full downloadable content packs. The current generation of consoles are more capable in that regard, and as such can handle the full game and it’s subsequent releases.
    So now you just want to “win” this discussion by misquoting and claiming that it was you who said what I said??

    I am not interested in “winning” and you know very well that it was me and not you who said that Blind Squirrel Games was hired to port the game to consoles because BSG had developed a new technic to port PC games to consoles! You can see a list of the games they have ported on http://blindsquirrelentertainment.com/category/press-releases/ and the games are from many different game companies!

    Of course they cooperated with EA devs too because they didn’t develop the game and only ported it. They are the experts in converting the code and the controls from keyboard and mouse to the controls for consoles. But they need help from EA when this requires adjustments to the gameplay too. Therefore there are also EA employees involved in the Sims 4 for consoles - and no, BSG doesn’t get the right to use the game code for any other purpose than to just do those ports to Xbox and PlayStation!
    Also I have already reiterated that you are making assumptions on my thinking with things that only you have said. Of course EA doesn’t do things at random, that isn’t how it works. Paid apps are not the current trend, free-to-play are. Why would EA utilize a business model from nearly 10 years ago when the newer model is more profitable and sustainable in the long run? Again, that only pertains to mobile games. PC games do not work with the freemium business model unless they are upscaled mobile games which The Sims 4 is not. You just admitted that you have no sales data, so how can you continue to say the mobile apps were “bad selling games”? You have no information on that; you said that yourself, so instead of making (objectively bad) assumptions try using a little bit of logic there. Bad selling things do not get made multiple times. A non-successful paid mobile app wouldn’t spawn 3 additional unique versions. Until you have some factual, relevant information you don’t need to respond.
    Because you just are a simmer and don’t want to know anything about how a game company works like I do I have to stop here because you just try to “invent” things to “win” the discussion while I instead just am interested in how things really works (which you aren’t).

    So let us just agree to disagree and wait a couple of months to see if EA doesn’t announce the next big Sims game anyway almost exactly as I have predicted ;)
  • jackjack_kjackjack_k Posts: 8,601 Member
    edited June 2018
    Yep, but it will be a few months till we get details.
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    @Erpe "Also the reason why people kept asking about TS4 being over was because they expected TS5 soon to be announced and therefore doubted that TS4 really would get many more packs."

    No, this wasn't the reason. It's because of the panic that ensued when a previous Guru on Reddit claimed that there was no development on The Sims 5 and that EA was shifting The Sims towards mobile. The natural assumption was that the game was ending. It didn't help that during that time, several gurus were fired, some were moved to mobile and EA wasn't communicating with us due to not having a community manager. That's when Graham stepped in to calm things down, and eventually Grant.
    The Reddit message was obviously from a simmer and not from a former guru! That was easy to see by the way it was written. So I doubt that this false message really created much panic.

    Also it would have been much easier for Grant and the gurus to just state that the reddit message was false instead of writing a huge number of messages on twitter about TS4 still getting a lot more new content (and even for years).

    But the gurus had to make simmers believe that TS4 isn’t over when TS5 (or what it will be called) soon will be announced. The problem wasn’t mainly the hardcore simmers in this forum though but the millions of casual simmers elsewhere. Therefore the gurus went on twitter to prepare all those simmers for the announcement of a new big Sims game hoping that they then would spread the information that TS4 isn’t over anyway.

    If you were online at all during that time, you would know that the message did create much panic. But it wasn't just the message alone, it was a combination of things.

    Maybe they didn't state that it was false because it wasn't? If you check the Reddit user's history, you'll see that he had some inside knowledge about the game. I believe him.

    All I can say is, start preparing those excuses you're going to need when The Sims 5 does not get announced. :*

    I don’t know exactly why he suddenly wrote that he was a former SimGuru. But it wasn’t true. He was just a long time fan of the Sims game instead (and maybe felt that he knew enough about the Sims games to see himself as some kind of guru).

    So basically what you’ve been doing here? I mean, you sure like to talk a lot about EA’s future plans for The Sims like you were in the room and know what’s going on behind the scenes.
    So you too think that EA just makes decisions at random and plans to just throw hundreds of millions of dollars away by switching it’s very profitable PC Sims games out with the much less profitable mobile Sims games ;):D

    EA has made many mobile Sims games earlier and also some Sims games for consoles. But before the Sims Freeplay and TS4 those Sims games for other platforms earned so little money that EA soon withdraw them from the market while all the PC Sims games earned huge profit to EA (and especially from all the extra packs that EA released).

    Mobile games similar to the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile are made by many other game companies too. But those game companies usually also release them in version for PCs because this is very cheap to do and increases their income. But EA only release the Sims Freeplay for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, WebOS, BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone. That is a lot of platforms. But where are the versions for Mac and Windows PC? Those PC versions would cost almost nothing to make. But EA wouldn’t make them because EA feared that they then would steal customers from the many times more profitable Sims 3 and Sims 4 games and packs!

    So no. You can’t convince me that EA cares so little about losing hundreds of millions of dollars by switching from the many times more profitable PC platforms to the many times less profitable mobile platforms (even though EA now finally have found a way to earn just a little profit from mobile Sims games too)! The PC platform is still the most profitable platform ever even though EA now has found a way to make packs too for a console port of the PC game and thus earn money that way too.

    I’ve actually never said that.

    I’m kind of going to gloss over most of this post, because you have made a huge error in your second paragraph. More specifically in your statement regarding the mobile games; there were a total of 5 Sims titles developed and released for iOS (TS3, TS3:World Adventures, TS3:Ambitions, TS: Medieval, and TS: Freeplay) between 2009 and 2011. The paid apps were not removed from the iOS AppStore until 2015, a year after The Sims 4 released on PC. I don’t know what you consider to be “soon”, but 4-6 years is a significant chunk of time to bring in money. Because, again, 4 of those 5 games cost money to even download and also featured micro transactions for additional in-game content. If those apps were not making enough money to be of any value to EA they would have pulled them, but instead they made more... because they were more profitable than you think. Do they make PC scale money? No, but no one has said they did. PC Sims makes nothing compared to other EA owned franchises, but that hasn’t stopped them from making more Sims games has it?
    I bought those mobile games out of curiosity because I actually loved both the Sims 3 World Adventures and the Sims Medieval in the PC versions. So I also tried several times to get into the mobile versions of those games (and also the Sims 3 for iOS). But I never managed to. All those games were boring in the mobile versions and only sold a little because simmers loved the PC versions and therefore wanted to try the mobile versions too.

    Paid mobile games don’t always have short lives. An example is Plague Inc which was released as a paid game for iOS 3 years ago but still is on the top 3 list for paid iOS games. But the problem with all the paid mobile Sims games has always been that they were just hugely simplified versions of the PC games and also very different even though they were given the same names to make simmers think that they maybe were worth buying - which they usually weren’t.

    The Sims Medieval was actually also released for Windows Phone but as late as 2013. But both Medieval and the 3 mobile Sims 3 games sold so little that they soon were withdrawn from the app stores - and without EA ever releasing a mobile version of TS4 anyway!

    I don’t know if EA really lost money on those mobile games. But EA surely didn’t earn much money on them either. So now EA doesn’t make paid games for mobile devices anymore.

    The console games had about the same problem until EA found a way to port TS4 and its packs to consoles and not just make simplified Sims games without packs for consoles too.

    Windows phone was an utter failure, don’t base anything on that or it’s app sales/performance. Console gets packs because of their design, which is better than what previous console hardware could handle. It has absolutely nothing to do with EA figuring out how to do it, it was on Sony/Microsoft.
    No, it was Blind Squirrel Games who developed a new technic to port PC games to consoles. This got EA interested and at a very late state of TS4’s development EA therefore negotiated with BSG to let them port TS4 to consoles:

    Do you have app sales data? You can’t speak to the performance of any of those apps because you don’t actually know. Stop making up facts and presenting them in this argument, it’s not working out there way you are hoping.
    No, I don’t have the app sales data. But unlike you I don’t think that EA just makes decisions at random and promote bad selling games or stops making well selling games. But you seem to think that the decisions to not make a paid mobile version of TS4 and not making a simplified console version already in 2014 were just taken by throwing a dice a couple of times ;)

    Erpe just stop now. The studio porting games to console was contracted by EA for the sole purpose of porting the games to console. The Sims is EA property, no one is authorized to do anything with it unless they are contracted by EA to do so. Also, porting games is not a new technique - it’s done for all kinds of games on all kinds of platforms. Why didn’t PS3/XB360 get ‘packs’? Because the systems themselves could not handle the full PC game, let alone full downloadable content packs. The current generation of consoles are more capable in that regard, and as such can handle the full game and it’s subsequent releases.
    So now you just want to “win” this discussion by misquoting and claiming that it was you who said what I said??

    I am not interested in “winning” and you know very well that it was me and not you who said that Blind Squirrel Games was hired to port the game to consoles because BSG had developed a new technic to port PC games to consoles! You can see a list of the games they have ported on http://blindsquirrelentertainment.com/category/press-releases/ and the games are from many different game companies!

    Of course they cooperated with EA devs too because they didn’t develop the game and only ported it. They are the experts in converting the code and the controls from keyboard and mouse to the controls for consoles. But they need help from EA when this requires adjustments to the gameplay too. Therefore there are also EA employees involved in the Sims 4 for consoles - and no, BSG doesn’t get the right to use the game code for any other purpose than to just do those ports to Xbox and PlayStation!
    Also I have already reiterated that you are making assumptions on my thinking with things that only you have said. Of course EA doesn’t do things at random, that isn’t how it works. Paid apps are not the current trend, free-to-play are. Why would EA utilize a business model from nearly 10 years ago when the newer model is more profitable and sustainable in the long run? Again, that only pertains to mobile games. PC games do not work with the freemium business model unless they are upscaled mobile games which The Sims 4 is not. You just admitted that you have no sales data, so how can you continue to say the mobile apps were “bad selling games”? You have no information on that; you said that yourself, so instead of making (objectively bad) assumptions try using a little bit of logic there. Bad selling things do not get made multiple times. A non-successful paid mobile app wouldn’t spawn 3 additional unique versions. Until you have some factual, relevant information you don’t need to respond.
    Because you just are a simmer and don’t want to know anything about how a game company works like I do I have to stop here because you just try to “invent” things to “win” the discussion while I instead just am interested in how things really works (which you aren’t).

    So let us just agree to disagree and wait a couple of months to see if EA doesn’t announce the next big Sims game anyway almost exactly as I have predicted ;)

    I can tell you, unless they hired all new staff for a new Sims game, there's no other Sims game.
    We knew The Sims 4 was coming when the high level Guru's disappeared from Sims 3 content (like Grant etc).

    The fact that Grant is still working on The Sims 4 for years to come is a clear sign there is no new game, because Grant worked heavily on the Sims 3 and 4 base games and was one of the key people who was making decisions about the game.

    Why bring TS4 to consoles just to kill it off early? It was probably decided to bring TS4 and all DLC to console when EA decided on giving TS4 an extremely long shelf life, rather than killing it off.

    Otherwise, we probably would have seen The Sims 4 on console much earlier if it was just a simple port. The delay for it to come to console probably came from EA deciding if all DLC would be ported too or not.


    It's already been established that EA take a huge loss on the base games (this was established when EA reported poor reports when TS4 first came out to investors even though they said it met expectations), and they make it up in the DLC. If the DLC is still exceeding EA's expectations, there is no reason for them to move on to The Sims 5.

    Nearly every developer ever will tell you that DLC and micro transactions is where profit comes from nowadays, there's no money in base games because people can torrent them for free. It's much harder to torrent DLC because of the amount of bugs and issues you'll run into having them and you need to update regularly to use DLC which means redownloading updated versions of the base game over and over to be able to use the new content, as patching your game yourself will leave you with a game that runs like crap.

    That's why DLC is such a huge thing nowadays. People claim companies are greedy, and to an extent, they are. But they are also selling you video games for like $60 when it's cost them millions and millions of dollars to create and they may only get a small portion of that back from base game sales.

    Only a small amount of franchises like GTA, Mario, Pokemon etc could make all their money back from selling the game alone. And most games that have no DLC, could have been released 10 years ago (looks at Mario Odyssey or the new Pokemon games that have been announced).
  • ErpeErpe Posts: 5,872 Member
    Nope, too soon!
    jackjack_k wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    @Erpe "Also the reason why people kept asking about TS4 being over was because they expected TS5 soon to be announced and therefore doubted that TS4 really would get many more packs."

    No, this wasn't the reason. It's because of the panic that ensued when a previous Guru on Reddit claimed that there was no development on The Sims 5 and that EA was shifting The Sims towards mobile. The natural assumption was that the game was ending. It didn't help that during that time, several gurus were fired, some were moved to mobile and EA wasn't communicating with us due to not having a community manager. That's when Graham stepped in to calm things down, and eventually Grant.
    The Reddit message was obviously from a simmer and not from a former guru! That was easy to see by the way it was written. So I doubt that this false message really created much panic.

    Also it would have been much easier for Grant and the gurus to just state that the reddit message was false instead of writing a huge number of messages on twitter about TS4 still getting a lot more new content (and even for years).

    But the gurus had to make simmers believe that TS4 isn’t over when TS5 (or what it will be called) soon will be announced. The problem wasn’t mainly the hardcore simmers in this forum though but the millions of casual simmers elsewhere. Therefore the gurus went on twitter to prepare all those simmers for the announcement of a new big Sims game hoping that they then would spread the information that TS4 isn’t over anyway.

    If you were online at all during that time, you would know that the message did create much panic. But it wasn't just the message alone, it was a combination of things.

    Maybe they didn't state that it was false because it wasn't? If you check the Reddit user's history, you'll see that he had some inside knowledge about the game. I believe him.

    All I can say is, start preparing those excuses you're going to need when The Sims 5 does not get announced. :*

    I don’t know exactly why he suddenly wrote that he was a former SimGuru. But it wasn’t true. He was just a long time fan of the Sims game instead (and maybe felt that he knew enough about the Sims games to see himself as some kind of guru).

    So basically what you’ve been doing here? I mean, you sure like to talk a lot about EA’s future plans for The Sims like you were in the room and know what’s going on behind the scenes.
    So you too think that EA just makes decisions at random and plans to just throw hundreds of millions of dollars away by switching it’s very profitable PC Sims games out with the much less profitable mobile Sims games ;):D

    EA has made many mobile Sims games earlier and also some Sims games for consoles. But before the Sims Freeplay and TS4 those Sims games for other platforms earned so little money that EA soon withdraw them from the market while all the PC Sims games earned huge profit to EA (and especially from all the extra packs that EA released).

    Mobile games similar to the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile are made by many other game companies too. But those game companies usually also release them in version for PCs because this is very cheap to do and increases their income. But EA only release the Sims Freeplay for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, WebOS, BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone. That is a lot of platforms. But where are the versions for Mac and Windows PC? Those PC versions would cost almost nothing to make. But EA wouldn’t make them because EA feared that they then would steal customers from the many times more profitable Sims 3 and Sims 4 games and packs!

    So no. You can’t convince me that EA cares so little about losing hundreds of millions of dollars by switching from the many times more profitable PC platforms to the many times less profitable mobile platforms (even though EA now finally have found a way to earn just a little profit from mobile Sims games too)! The PC platform is still the most profitable platform ever even though EA now has found a way to make packs too for a console port of the PC game and thus earn money that way too.

    I’ve actually never said that.

    I’m kind of going to gloss over most of this post, because you have made a huge error in your second paragraph. More specifically in your statement regarding the mobile games; there were a total of 5 Sims titles developed and released for iOS (TS3, TS3:World Adventures, TS3:Ambitions, TS: Medieval, and TS: Freeplay) between 2009 and 2011. The paid apps were not removed from the iOS AppStore until 2015, a year after The Sims 4 released on PC. I don’t know what you consider to be “soon”, but 4-6 years is a significant chunk of time to bring in money. Because, again, 4 of those 5 games cost money to even download and also featured micro transactions for additional in-game content. If those apps were not making enough money to be of any value to EA they would have pulled them, but instead they made more... because they were more profitable than you think. Do they make PC scale money? No, but no one has said they did. PC Sims makes nothing compared to other EA owned franchises, but that hasn’t stopped them from making more Sims games has it?
    I bought those mobile games out of curiosity because I actually loved both the Sims 3 World Adventures and the Sims Medieval in the PC versions. So I also tried several times to get into the mobile versions of those games (and also the Sims 3 for iOS). But I never managed to. All those games were boring in the mobile versions and only sold a little because simmers loved the PC versions and therefore wanted to try the mobile versions too.

    Paid mobile games don’t always have short lives. An example is Plague Inc which was released as a paid game for iOS 3 years ago but still is on the top 3 list for paid iOS games. But the problem with all the paid mobile Sims games has always been that they were just hugely simplified versions of the PC games and also very different even though they were given the same names to make simmers think that they maybe were worth buying - which they usually weren’t.

    The Sims Medieval was actually also released for Windows Phone but as late as 2013. But both Medieval and the 3 mobile Sims 3 games sold so little that they soon were withdrawn from the app stores - and without EA ever releasing a mobile version of TS4 anyway!

    I don’t know if EA really lost money on those mobile games. But EA surely didn’t earn much money on them either. So now EA doesn’t make paid games for mobile devices anymore.

    The console games had about the same problem until EA found a way to port TS4 and its packs to consoles and not just make simplified Sims games without packs for consoles too.

    Windows phone was an utter failure, don’t base anything on that or it’s app sales/performance. Console gets packs because of their design, which is better than what previous console hardware could handle. It has absolutely nothing to do with EA figuring out how to do it, it was on Sony/Microsoft.
    No, it was Blind Squirrel Games who developed a new technic to port PC games to consoles. This got EA interested and at a very late state of TS4’s development EA therefore negotiated with BSG to let them port TS4 to consoles:

    Do you have app sales data? You can’t speak to the performance of any of those apps because you don’t actually know. Stop making up facts and presenting them in this argument, it’s not working out there way you are hoping.
    No, I don’t have the app sales data. But unlike you I don’t think that EA just makes decisions at random and promote bad selling games or stops making well selling games. But you seem to think that the decisions to not make a paid mobile version of TS4 and not making a simplified console version already in 2014 were just taken by throwing a dice a couple of times ;)

    Erpe just stop now. The studio porting games to console was contracted by EA for the sole purpose of porting the games to console. The Sims is EA property, no one is authorized to do anything with it unless they are contracted by EA to do so. Also, porting games is not a new technique - it’s done for all kinds of games on all kinds of platforms. Why didn’t PS3/XB360 get ‘packs’? Because the systems themselves could not handle the full PC game, let alone full downloadable content packs. The current generation of consoles are more capable in that regard, and as such can handle the full game and it’s subsequent releases.
    So now you just want to “win” this discussion by misquoting and claiming that it was you who said what I said??

    I am not interested in “winning” and you know very well that it was me and not you who said that Blind Squirrel Games was hired to port the game to consoles because BSG had developed a new technic to port PC games to consoles! You can see a list of the games they have ported on http://blindsquirrelentertainment.com/category/press-releases/ and the games are from many different game companies!

    Of course they cooperated with EA devs too because they didn’t develop the game and only ported it. They are the experts in converting the code and the controls from keyboard and mouse to the controls for consoles. But they need help from EA when this requires adjustments to the gameplay too. Therefore there are also EA employees involved in the Sims 4 for consoles - and no, BSG doesn’t get the right to use the game code for any other purpose than to just do those ports to Xbox and PlayStation!
    Also I have already reiterated that you are making assumptions on my thinking with things that only you have said. Of course EA doesn’t do things at random, that isn’t how it works. Paid apps are not the current trend, free-to-play are. Why would EA utilize a business model from nearly 10 years ago when the newer model is more profitable and sustainable in the long run? Again, that only pertains to mobile games. PC games do not work with the freemium business model unless they are upscaled mobile games which The Sims 4 is not. You just admitted that you have no sales data, so how can you continue to say the mobile apps were “bad selling games”? You have no information on that; you said that yourself, so instead of making (objectively bad) assumptions try using a little bit of logic there. Bad selling things do not get made multiple times. A non-successful paid mobile app wouldn’t spawn 3 additional unique versions. Until you have some factual, relevant information you don’t need to respond.
    Because you just are a simmer and don’t want to know anything about how a game company works like I do I have to stop here because you just try to “invent” things to “win” the discussion while I instead just am interested in how things really works (which you aren’t).

    So let us just agree to disagree and wait a couple of months to see if EA doesn’t announce the next big Sims game anyway almost exactly as I have predicted ;)

    I can tell you, unless they hired all new staff for a new Sims game, there's no other Sims game.
    We knew The Sims 4 was coming when the high level Guru's disappeared from Sims 3 content (like Grant etc).

    The fact that Grant is still working on The Sims 4 for years to come is a clear sign there is no new game, because Grant worked heavily on the Sims 3 and 4 base games and was one of the key people who was making decisions about the game.
    You forget the following: In 2009-2014 EA had two groups of developers:
    1. A group of devs who made packs and store content for TS3.
    2. Another group of devs who we didn’t really know anything about because they just first developed a new game engine for TS4 and then made experiments that finally resulted in the release of the Sims 4 basegame in 2014.

    If we simplify it just a little then we can say that one of those groups now make packs for TS4 while the other group (which we still don’t know much about) has been working on the next basegame which I therefore think soon will be announced.
    Why bring TS4 to consoles just to kill it off early? It was probably decided to bring TS4 and all DLC to console when EA decided on giving TS4 an extremely long shelf life, rather than killing it off.
    No, it was decided by EA early in 2017 when EA discovered that it would cost much less than EA had expected if EA let Blind Squirrel Games do most of the conversion. (EA was impressed by BSG’s similar work on games from other game companies.)

    Also the packs for the console game has been released much faster than EA usually believe in because if EA releases packs for too much money within a too short time interval then sales numbers of course can be expected to go down. But I think that there are two reasons why EA releases packs so unusually fast for the console game:
    1. They are so cheap to make that EA preferably wants all packs converted.
    2. The packs has to be released fast because otherwise they likely will sell less after the release of the next big PC game.
    It's already been established that EA take a huge loss on the base games, and they make it up in the DLC. If the DLC is still exceeding EA's expectations, there is no reason for them to move on to The Sims 5.
    This problem has been there since TS1 and it hasn’t really changed. EA knows that it will lose most of the current customers every time a new basegame is released. But EA has always released a new basegame every 5 years because EA has seen this as necessary if EA wants to get the millions of new customers who EA therefore always must have thought are more important.

    Beside that the sales numbers for the basegames are so huge that they likely are profitable anyway. This profit could have been even higher though if EA hadn’t made a completely new dedicated game engine for each basegame. But EA has made such a game engine anyway because if EA instead had used a more general game engine then the packs would have become much more expensive for EA to make too.
    Nearly every developer ever will tell you that DLC and micro transactions is where profit comes from nowadays, there's no money in base games because people can torrent them for free. It's much harder to torrent DLC because of the amount of bugs and issues you'll run into having them and you need to update regularly to use DLC which means redownloading updated versions of the base game over and over to be able to use the new content, as patching your game yourself will leave you with a game that runs like plum.

    That's why DLC is such a huge thing nowadays. People claim companies are greedy, and to an extent, they are. But they are also selling you video games for like $60 when it's cost them millions and millions of dollars to create and they may only get a small portion of that back from base game sales.

    Only a small amount of franchises like GTA could make all their money back from selling the game alone.
    I mostly agree with you here. But the tendency is to make all games into online live services where we both can buy DLC and pay for subscriptions. Also for the Sims games this looks very promising for the following reasons:
    1. The problem with the big Sims games is that EA has to make a new basegame every 5 years to make the game attractive again for new simmers and this cost a lot of the more experienced customers who otherwise still would have liked to play the game. But an online live service can get around this problem. The usual way is to just let new customers add all older content at once and very cheap if only they pay for a subscription too. This removes the need for a new basegame every 5 years.
    2. To let customers - who pay for a subscription - get different advantages means that the game company doesn’t need to sell DLC for as high prices to get just as much profit anyway.

    But the problem isn’t that making an expensive but popular game isn’t profitable - because it sure is! The problem instead is that some games fails and never gets nearly as popular as the game company had hoped. This gives huge losses. So the game companies are cautious and usually only make small cheap games when they are experimenting and hoping to find a new popular game concept.
  • simgirl1010simgirl1010 Posts: 35,708 Member
    edited June 2018
    Nope, but they’ll announce a Game Pack instead.
    Let's all say hello to a brand new Sims 4 producer. :) Looks like they're gearing up for lots more to come.
    Kb0uDXK.png
  • drake_mccartydrake_mccarty Posts: 6,114 Member
    Nope, too soon!
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    @Erpe "Also the reason why people kept asking about TS4 being over was because they expected TS5 soon to be announced and therefore doubted that TS4 really would get many more packs."

    No, this wasn't the reason. It's because of the panic that ensued when a previous Guru on Reddit claimed that there was no development on The Sims 5 and that EA was shifting The Sims towards mobile. The natural assumption was that the game was ending. It didn't help that during that time, several gurus were fired, some were moved to mobile and EA wasn't communicating with us due to not having a community manager. That's when Graham stepped in to calm things down, and eventually Grant.
    The Reddit message was obviously from a simmer and not from a former guru! That was easy to see by the way it was written. So I doubt that this false message really created much panic.

    Also it would have been much easier for Grant and the gurus to just state that the reddit message was false instead of writing a huge number of messages on twitter about TS4 still getting a lot more new content (and even for years).

    But the gurus had to make simmers believe that TS4 isn’t over when TS5 (or what it will be called) soon will be announced. The problem wasn’t mainly the hardcore simmers in this forum though but the millions of casual simmers elsewhere. Therefore the gurus went on twitter to prepare all those simmers for the announcement of a new big Sims game hoping that they then would spread the information that TS4 isn’t over anyway.

    If you were online at all during that time, you would know that the message did create much panic. But it wasn't just the message alone, it was a combination of things.

    Maybe they didn't state that it was false because it wasn't? If you check the Reddit user's history, you'll see that he had some inside knowledge about the game. I believe him.

    All I can say is, start preparing those excuses you're going to need when The Sims 5 does not get announced. :*

    I don’t know exactly why he suddenly wrote that he was a former SimGuru. But it wasn’t true. He was just a long time fan of the Sims game instead (and maybe felt that he knew enough about the Sims games to see himself as some kind of guru).

    So basically what you’ve been doing here? I mean, you sure like to talk a lot about EA’s future plans for The Sims like you were in the room and know what’s going on behind the scenes.
    So you too think that EA just makes decisions at random and plans to just throw hundreds of millions of dollars away by switching it’s very profitable PC Sims games out with the much less profitable mobile Sims games ;):D

    EA has made many mobile Sims games earlier and also some Sims games for consoles. But before the Sims Freeplay and TS4 those Sims games for other platforms earned so little money that EA soon withdraw them from the market while all the PC Sims games earned huge profit to EA (and especially from all the extra packs that EA released).

    Mobile games similar to the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile are made by many other game companies too. But those game companies usually also release them in version for PCs because this is very cheap to do and increases their income. But EA only release the Sims Freeplay for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, WebOS, BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone. That is a lot of platforms. But where are the versions for Mac and Windows PC? Those PC versions would cost almost nothing to make. But EA wouldn’t make them because EA feared that they then would steal customers from the many times more profitable Sims 3 and Sims 4 games and packs!

    So no. You can’t convince me that EA cares so little about losing hundreds of millions of dollars by switching from the many times more profitable PC platforms to the many times less profitable mobile platforms (even though EA now finally have found a way to earn just a little profit from mobile Sims games too)! The PC platform is still the most profitable platform ever even though EA now has found a way to make packs too for a console port of the PC game and thus earn money that way too.

    I’ve actually never said that.

    I’m kind of going to gloss over most of this post, because you have made a huge error in your second paragraph. More specifically in your statement regarding the mobile games; there were a total of 5 Sims titles developed and released for iOS (TS3, TS3:World Adventures, TS3:Ambitions, TS: Medieval, and TS: Freeplay) between 2009 and 2011. The paid apps were not removed from the iOS AppStore until 2015, a year after The Sims 4 released on PC. I don’t know what you consider to be “soon”, but 4-6 years is a significant chunk of time to bring in money. Because, again, 4 of those 5 games cost money to even download and also featured micro transactions for additional in-game content. If those apps were not making enough money to be of any value to EA they would have pulled them, but instead they made more... because they were more profitable than you think. Do they make PC scale money? No, but no one has said they did. PC Sims makes nothing compared to other EA owned franchises, but that hasn’t stopped them from making more Sims games has it?
    I bought those mobile games out of curiosity because I actually loved both the Sims 3 World Adventures and the Sims Medieval in the PC versions. So I also tried several times to get into the mobile versions of those games (and also the Sims 3 for iOS). But I never managed to. All those games were boring in the mobile versions and only sold a little because simmers loved the PC versions and therefore wanted to try the mobile versions too.

    Paid mobile games don’t always have short lives. An example is Plague Inc which was released as a paid game for iOS 3 years ago but still is on the top 3 list for paid iOS games. But the problem with all the paid mobile Sims games has always been that they were just hugely simplified versions of the PC games and also very different even though they were given the same names to make simmers think that they maybe were worth buying - which they usually weren’t.

    The Sims Medieval was actually also released for Windows Phone but as late as 2013. But both Medieval and the 3 mobile Sims 3 games sold so little that they soon were withdrawn from the app stores - and without EA ever releasing a mobile version of TS4 anyway!

    I don’t know if EA really lost money on those mobile games. But EA surely didn’t earn much money on them either. So now EA doesn’t make paid games for mobile devices anymore.

    The console games had about the same problem until EA found a way to port TS4 and its packs to consoles and not just make simplified Sims games without packs for consoles too.

    Windows phone was an utter failure, don’t base anything on that or it’s app sales/performance. Console gets packs because of their design, which is better than what previous console hardware could handle. It has absolutely nothing to do with EA figuring out how to do it, it was on Sony/Microsoft.
    No, it was Blind Squirrel Games who developed a new technic to port PC games to consoles. This got EA interested and at a very late state of TS4’s development EA therefore negotiated with BSG to let them port TS4 to consoles:

    Do you have app sales data? You can’t speak to the performance of any of those apps because you don’t actually know. Stop making up facts and presenting them in this argument, it’s not working out there way you are hoping.
    No, I don’t have the app sales data. But unlike you I don’t think that EA just makes decisions at random and promote bad selling games or stops making well selling games. But you seem to think that the decisions to not make a paid mobile version of TS4 and not making a simplified console version already in 2014 were just taken by throwing a dice a couple of times ;)

    Erpe just stop now. The studio porting games to console was contracted by EA for the sole purpose of porting the games to console. The Sims is EA property, no one is authorized to do anything with it unless they are contracted by EA to do so. Also, porting games is not a new technique - it’s done for all kinds of games on all kinds of platforms. Why didn’t PS3/XB360 get ‘packs’? Because the systems themselves could not handle the full PC game, let alone full downloadable content packs. The current generation of consoles are more capable in that regard, and as such can handle the full game and it’s subsequent releases.
    So now you just want to “win” this discussion by misquoting and claiming that it was you who said what I said??

    I am not interested in “winning” and you know very well that it was me and not you who said that Blind Squirrel Games was hired to port the game to consoles because BSG had developed a new technic to port PC games to consoles! You can see a list of the games they have ported on http://blindsquirrelentertainment.com/category/press-releases/ and the games are from many different game companies!

    Of course they cooperated with EA devs too because they didn’t develop the game and only ported it. They are the experts in converting the code and the controls from keyboard and mouse to the controls for consoles. But they need help from EA when this requires adjustments to the gameplay too. Therefore there are also EA employees involved in the Sims 4 for consoles - and no, BSG doesn’t get the right to use the game code for any other purpose than to just do those ports to Xbox and PlayStation!
    Also I have already reiterated that you are making assumptions on my thinking with things that only you have said. Of course EA doesn’t do things at random, that isn’t how it works. Paid apps are not the current trend, free-to-play are. Why would EA utilize a business model from nearly 10 years ago when the newer model is more profitable and sustainable in the long run? Again, that only pertains to mobile games. PC games do not work with the freemium business model unless they are upscaled mobile games which The Sims 4 is not. You just admitted that you have no sales data, so how can you continue to say the mobile apps were “bad selling games”? You have no information on that; you said that yourself, so instead of making (objectively bad) assumptions try using a little bit of logic there. Bad selling things do not get made multiple times. A non-successful paid mobile app wouldn’t spawn 3 additional unique versions. Until you have some factual, relevant information you don’t need to respond.
    Because you just are a simmer and don’t want to know anything about how a game company works like I do I have to stop here because you just try to “invent” things to “win” the discussion while I instead just am interested in how things really works (which you aren’t).

    So let us just agree to disagree and wait a couple of months to see if EA doesn’t announce the next big Sims game anyway almost exactly as I have predicted ;)

    Yeah I said EA contracted the studio to port the games to console, don’t distort what I said. I know very well how these things work, which is why I chose to correct the inaccuracies you have presented in multiple of your posts. I am not sure if you are being serious, or trolling but you have, again, failed to produce anything to legitimize your inaccurate statements and have repeatedly distorted my words. I’m not trying to win anything here, this is a public forum. If I see something that is inaccurate being presented as a factual thing I will step in to correct it. It’s not obligatory, but it certainly helps stop the intentional spreading of misinformation.

    I already said you don’t have to respond to me unless you have verified, legitimate information regarding your misstatements. Instead you reiterated what I told you, which is counter productive to the reason I replied to your comment in the first place. You can believe there is a Sims 5 announcement right around the corner, by all means, but there is plenty of verified, official statement that say no it’s not. However in a couple months you will be repeating the same sentiment you are now, for whatever reason because Sims 5 has (according to you) been so close to announcement for months now. How did that EA Play announcement go??
  • SimTrippySimTrippy Posts: 7,651 Member
    edited June 2018
    Erpe wrote: »
    LiELF wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    jackjack_k wrote: »
    @Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    @catloverplayer The Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile didn’t fail! Actually they were the first mobile Sims games that didn’t fail like the mobile versions of TS2, TS3 and the Sims Medieval all did - and exactly because TSF and TSM were online multiplayer games! ;)

    I don’t know if TS5 will fail or not because we don’t know anything about it yet (except that it has been in development since 2014 and almost certainly is multiplayer). Most likely it will be very different from the earlier big Sims games but still get packs and DLC.

    But I know that the small group of hardcore veteran simmers (maybe about a thousand?) in this forum are hard to convince because they just refuse the fact that they aren’t even in the target group for the big Sims games which instead are the millions of new young casual simmers who buy the huge majority of the games. (Therefore the gurus ignore this forum and use twitter instead.)

    Neither of those games are multiplayer, at least not in any way that would qualify a PC game as multiplayer. Both of those games are also free to install, and for the most part free to play.

    EA tried multiplayer with this game and it didn’t work out. I don’t know why you are basing your prediction for the sequel on mobile games, or a speculative “new group of casual simmers“. You don’t know who is installing those apps, or buying this game; for all you know there could be considerable overlap.
    EA tried rain and weather in the Sims 2 basegame. But it didn’t work out. The game became unstable and it was raining inside the houses. So EA just gave up and decided never to include weather in the Sims games, right?

    We all know that this wasn’t what happened. EA planned multiplayer for TS4 and for SimCity 2013. But when SimCity 2013 was released EA saw that multiplayer had been made in the wrong way and there wasn’t enough time to make it better in TS4. Therefore TS4 didn’t become a multiplayer game anyway. But EA then gave up and removed multiplayer from all its PC games? No, of course not! Instead EA began making TS5 and give it an improved multiplayer part that didn’t have the same problems.

    There are a huge number of ways to make multiplayer games and I don’t understand why it isn’t multiplayer when I am visiting cities belonging to my friends in the Sims Freeplay or let my sims become friends with sims that are owned by other simmers in any of the two mobile games??

    The two mobile games aren’t identical and in the Sims Mobile we can’t even visit cities belonging to other simmers as we can in Freeplay. TS5 will likely have multiplayer in a third way which I can’t guess yet. Maybe we can visit cities belonging to other simmers or maybe we can’t. Maybe we can invite sims belonging to other simmers like in the Sims Mobile. Maybe TS5 will be real-time too even though I doubt it. Maybe TS5 will require an Internet connection all the time or maybe it like so many multiplayer games can be played offline too. We just don’t know yet. But that EA should throw millions of dollars away by ignoring the huge minority of new young simmers just to please a few thousand older veteran simmers who want packs for TS4 in at least 20 more years isn’t within the real world no matter how hard you fight to convince me that EA care more about veteran simmers than about money ;):D

    There is no Sims 5. Please stop spreading information that there is. Until they confirm it, it’s not coming. Grant has already replied to people on Twitter than TS5 isn’t coming.
    Don’t lie! Grant has instead been very careful not to say anything about TS5 at all!

    The only time he ever has mentioned TS5 was when somebody asked him if the EPs he plans making are for TS5? Then he answered “No, they are for TS4.” But once more he just omitted the natural continuation which of course would have been ”..because TS5 won’t be released for a couple of years.” So don’t lie! Just because EA hasn’t yet told us which Sims games EA will release in the future this doesn’t mean that EA has said that they never ever will release a new Sims game again!
    And the majority of new Simmers have also disliked the idea of online. There have been several polls on various sites with people saying they don’t want an online game.
    Nevertheless EA released both the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile anyway!

    There had also been several polls that showed that TS1 simmers didn’t want TS2 because they wanted more EPs for TS1 instead. But EA released TS2 anyway and I still remember how extremely angry almost all TS1 became.

    Then it became the Sims 2 simmers who hated the idea about TS3 and wanted many more EPs for TS2. But EA just released TS3 after 5 years anyway.

    Then it became the Sims 3 simmers who hated the idea about TS4 and many of them still refuse to play TS4 at all. But after 5 years EA released TS4 anyway.

    Now (for the fourth time) the current simmers (who now play TS4) hate the idea about TS5 and demand more EPs for TS4 instead. But for the fourth time they won’t be able to stop EA from announcing and releasing TS5 which likely again has been in development since 2014.

    The only thing that is new is that the Sims 4 simmers seem to have been able to make EA release more packs even after the release of TS5 which shows me that TS5 must be an online multiplayer game because such games usually have a much longer life than offline games have. (World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and still get new content now 14 years later.)

    So no! I don’t doubt that TS5 is about to be announced this summer. You may be right that most Sims 4 simmers won’t like it and won’t buy it very soon because EA seems to expect that too. But it will be the game for all the young new simmers who now only have the mobile Sims games to play.

    What I am most curious about is if EA really wants TS5 be based on subscriptions in a way similar to how World of Warcraft works? EA Access could be used for that. But exactly how EA will do it we just don’t know yet.

    Ask yourself why Grant so many times just has repeated that TS4 isn’t dead and still has a lot of planned content when he instead just could have said: “We are not ready to switch to Sims 5 for at least a couple more years. So don’t worry about TS4! It will still be our main Sims games for more years!” Why was it so important for him not to say that and to avoid mentioning TS5 at all??

    I think one of the problems here is that you keep reading Grant's quote in the wrong context. Maybe it's a language barrier, maybe it's just errant reading comprehension, but to clarify:

    A person on Twitter asked:
    "When you say a potential future pack, do you mean like for The Sims 5?"

    To which Grant replied:
    "No. Focused on Sims 4."

    I notice that when you repeat his answer, you put a comma between "no" and "focused", making his answer one sentence and assuming a deflected answer. This is incorrect. He first answered, "No." Period. As in, "No, I do NOT mean a potential future pack for Sims 5." Then he added, "Focused on Sims 4." As in, "Potential future pack ONLY for Sims 4." His sentence structure made his meaning perfectly clear. It has nothing to do with "wishful thinking" or interpretation.
    You are not remembering his tweets correctly and we can’t discuss this further without finding those tweets to see their exact wording. But he had to repeat many times that TS4 isn’t over and that he still plans to make a lot of more packs for TS4. In the end he even did something as unusual as to talk about packs “for years” even though EA never has done something like that before because EA usually doesn’t allow the devs to talk about unannouced packs at all!
    Also, I don't understand why you expect him to say anything that implies "Sims 5 in a few years" because that was not the question asked, nor has there been any implication whatsoever of even a hint to Sims 5 existing at all. If anything, his firm answer regarding development focus on Sims 4 for years to come, does more to imply that Sims 5 is nowhere near completion, if it's even being developed at all.
    I can’t explain that further without bringing maybe about 20 tweets where he again and again answered questions that were motivated by people’s curiosity about TS4’s future now where TS5 maybe could be announced.
    Furthermore, it doesn't seem to occur to you that your theory about EA "needing a new Sims game every five years because new young simmers can't buy all of the packs to a full game and they are the most important customers" might be completely wrong. Especially when all evidence currently points to the fact that Sims 4 is doing extremely well with sales and is, in fact, growing its player base and new Simmers are joining in on Sims 4 just fine. Which is why EA has decided to have the devs be more active on Twitter, (a social media network popular to younger generations), to engage the new generation of Simmers and to promote The Sims 4 and the new Seasons expansion. Remember, Seasons was only announced one month before its release date, which is very different from how EPs were handled before. So EA has decided on a new strategy to use twitter to market the expansions in a shorter time period. EA is also now interested in what these new Simmers want for Sims 4, so Grant, the lead producer, is taking polls and suggestions in order to continue full speed ahead with years more of development. Grant even stated it himself that they are indeed planning Sims 4 content for years to come. This is not "wishful thinking", this is actual factual statements from the lead producer himself.

    You ask why the devs have suddenly appeared on Twitter but you keep avoiding the most obvious answer: EA wants to continue to market Sims 4 to new Simmers because that's where the money is. Things are different for this era of The Sims. The game hasn't even reached its peak yet, but it is gaining momentum and more players join every day. There are brand new EA programs for Game Changers and there's Fan Kits now, and merchandise, and Sims 4 is more sensationalized than ever. This is Sims 4 in its heyday and there is no room for Sims 5 right now. It might be in development but it's very unlikely to be anywhere near ready to release. And if it were, It would only bring competition to its own profits, which is bad business. EA wouldn't risk releasing a competitor and dividing its own fanbase by making them choose which game to support. If you think parents have trouble buying their kids a Sims game with lots of extra packs, why in the world then, would they support two Sims games with lots of packs? By your own logic, the parents wouldn't support it. Especially if their young Simmer was already invested in the first game.

    There is more evidence against Sims 5 coming out anytime soon than there is to justify it's existence. It would be a bad business move by EA and they wouldn't compete with their own game in its prime, no matter how different the "new" model is. If anything, that is wishful thinking.
    It seems that I can’t convince people that EA just doesn’t want to lose millions of new simmers who would be forced to only play free mobile Sims games for years if EA didn’t release a new big PC Sims game for them.

    The interesting question is for me instead why EA released the Sims Mobile when EA already had the Sims Freeplay? People expected the Sims Mobile to replace Freeplay. But this doesn’t seem to be EA’s plan at all. Also the Sims Mobile is an extremely small and repetitive game where you only play 2-4 adult sims in one house and do almost the same quests over and over. So I actually doubt that simmers will play it for years like they have done with the Sims Freeplay. Therefore I now suspect EA to have planned the Sims Mobile mostly just as an introduction for the next big Sims game.

    Has it ever occured to you that you cannot convince anyone because you might just be...wrong?

    @LiELF honestly don't bother. I don't think this person even really cares about facts that don't support his vision.

    Again though @Erpe
    Grant is almost always only active on Twitter before an EP releases. It's not out of the blue. It's actually been a convincing sign to many that an EP was coming.
    Also, many gurus became more active because the absence of a CM and a few layoffs made everyone very uncomfortable about the future of TS4. They came on to tell us that usually a CM would be interacting with us to avoid them sharing anything they're not allowed to but that they still wanted to soothe our fears.

    None of that is out of the blue.

    Don't tell @LiELF that she's the one not remembering the wording of a tweet correctly, when you fit tweets and facts into alternate timelines just so you can use them to tell us TS5 will be announced at E3. Oh oops, sorry, Gamescom now -_-
  • jackjack_kjackjack_k Posts: 8,601 Member
    Yep, but it will be a few months till we get details.
    3 year after the Maxis Organizational Update, we should begin to see the effects.

    This means absolutely nothing. This was about Lucy leaving as head of Maxis and Rachel coming on.

    Rachel has left and Lyndsay is now in charge of The Sims franchise, with Grant also being recently promoted to senior producer. They basically call the shots and the shots they've called is The Sims 4 is here to stay. As long as EA get the money they expect (and they've said they're getting more than they expect every quarter) there's no reason to have a Sims 5.

    It's basically up to Lyndsay where the franchise grows, as she is now Executive Producer on the Sims franchise and she works close with Grant who is now the senior producer of The Sims 4, I'm sure her statement echoes Grants.

    They would never have The Sims 4 run into The Sims 5, nor can they make a statement on the future of The Sims 4 if they couldn't confirm it.

    The fact that Grant has openly advertised The Sims 4 still has years to go, means they can openly say that because that has been cemented. If it hadn't, he wouldn't be allowed to speak on it.

    They never said anything about the future of TS2/TS3, because of the fact they knew it was coming to an end. We never heard "There's years to come of The Sims 3" in 2013, did we? Even though the channels of communication back then were the strongest the franchise has ever had.
  • simgirl1010simgirl1010 Posts: 35,708 Member
    Nope, but they’ll announce a Game Pack instead.
    SimTrippy wrote: »

    Don't tell @LiELF that she's the one not remembering the wording of a tweet correctly, when you fit tweets and facts into alternate timelines just so you can use them to tell us TS5 will be announced at E3. Oh oops, sorry, Gamescom now -_-

    :p August 21. Two months to come up with a new theory.
  • ErpeErpe Posts: 5,872 Member
    Nope, too soon!
    SimTrippy wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    LiELF wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    jackjack_k wrote: »
    @Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    @catloverplayer The Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile didn’t fail! Actually they were the first mobile Sims games that didn’t fail like the mobile versions of TS2, TS3 and the Sims Medieval all did - and exactly because TSF and TSM were online multiplayer games! ;)

    I don’t know if TS5 will fail or not because we don’t know anything about it yet (except that it has been in development since 2014 and almost certainly is multiplayer). Most likely it will be very different from the earlier big Sims games but still get packs and DLC.

    But I know that the small group of hardcore veteran simmers (maybe about a thousand?) in this forum are hard to convince because they just refuse the fact that they aren’t even in the target group for the big Sims games which instead are the millions of new young casual simmers who buy the huge majority of the games. (Therefore the gurus ignore this forum and use twitter instead.)

    Neither of those games are multiplayer, at least not in any way that would qualify a PC game as multiplayer. Both of those games are also free to install, and for the most part free to play.

    EA tried multiplayer with this game and it didn’t work out. I don’t know why you are basing your prediction for the sequel on mobile games, or a speculative “new group of casual simmers“. You don’t know who is installing those apps, or buying this game; for all you know there could be considerable overlap.
    EA tried rain and weather in the Sims 2 basegame. But it didn’t work out. The game became unstable and it was raining inside the houses. So EA just gave up and decided never to include weather in the Sims games, right?

    We all know that this wasn’t what happened. EA planned multiplayer for TS4 and for SimCity 2013. But when SimCity 2013 was released EA saw that multiplayer had been made in the wrong way and there wasn’t enough time to make it better in TS4. Therefore TS4 didn’t become a multiplayer game anyway. But EA then gave up and removed multiplayer from all its PC games? No, of course not! Instead EA began making TS5 and give it an improved multiplayer part that didn’t have the same problems.

    There are a huge number of ways to make multiplayer games and I don’t understand why it isn’t multiplayer when I am visiting cities belonging to my friends in the Sims Freeplay or let my sims become friends with sims that are owned by other simmers in any of the two mobile games??

    The two mobile games aren’t identical and in the Sims Mobile we can’t even visit cities belonging to other simmers as we can in Freeplay. TS5 will likely have multiplayer in a third way which I can’t guess yet. Maybe we can visit cities belonging to other simmers or maybe we can’t. Maybe we can invite sims belonging to other simmers like in the Sims Mobile. Maybe TS5 will be real-time too even though I doubt it. Maybe TS5 will require an Internet connection all the time or maybe it like so many multiplayer games can be played offline too. We just don’t know yet. But that EA should throw millions of dollars away by ignoring the huge minority of new young simmers just to please a few thousand older veteran simmers who want packs for TS4 in at least 20 more years isn’t within the real world no matter how hard you fight to convince me that EA care more about veteran simmers than about money ;):D

    There is no Sims 5. Please stop spreading information that there is. Until they confirm it, it’s not coming. Grant has already replied to people on Twitter than TS5 isn’t coming.
    Don’t lie! Grant has instead been very careful not to say anything about TS5 at all!

    The only time he ever has mentioned TS5 was when somebody asked him if the EPs he plans making are for TS5? Then he answered “No, they are for TS4.” But once more he just omitted the natural continuation which of course would have been ”..because TS5 won’t be released for a couple of years.” So don’t lie! Just because EA hasn’t yet told us which Sims games EA will release in the future this doesn’t mean that EA has said that they never ever will release a new Sims game again!
    And the majority of new Simmers have also disliked the idea of online. There have been several polls on various sites with people saying they don’t want an online game.
    Nevertheless EA released both the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile anyway!

    There had also been several polls that showed that TS1 simmers didn’t want TS2 because they wanted more EPs for TS1 instead. But EA released TS2 anyway and I still remember how extremely angry almost all TS1 became.

    Then it became the Sims 2 simmers who hated the idea about TS3 and wanted many more EPs for TS2. But EA just released TS3 after 5 years anyway.

    Then it became the Sims 3 simmers who hated the idea about TS4 and many of them still refuse to play TS4 at all. But after 5 years EA released TS4 anyway.

    Now (for the fourth time) the current simmers (who now play TS4) hate the idea about TS5 and demand more EPs for TS4 instead. But for the fourth time they won’t be able to stop EA from announcing and releasing TS5 which likely again has been in development since 2014.

    The only thing that is new is that the Sims 4 simmers seem to have been able to make EA release more packs even after the release of TS5 which shows me that TS5 must be an online multiplayer game because such games usually have a much longer life than offline games have. (World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and still get new content now 14 years later.)

    So no! I don’t doubt that TS5 is about to be announced this summer. You may be right that most Sims 4 simmers won’t like it and won’t buy it very soon because EA seems to expect that too. But it will be the game for all the young new simmers who now only have the mobile Sims games to play.

    What I am most curious about is if EA really wants TS5 be based on subscriptions in a way similar to how World of Warcraft works? EA Access could be used for that. But exactly how EA will do it we just don’t know yet.

    Ask yourself why Grant so many times just has repeated that TS4 isn’t dead and still has a lot of planned content when he instead just could have said: “We are not ready to switch to Sims 5 for at least a couple more years. So don’t worry about TS4! It will still be our main Sims games for more years!” Why was it so important for him not to say that and to avoid mentioning TS5 at all??

    I think one of the problems here is that you keep reading Grant's quote in the wrong context. Maybe it's a language barrier, maybe it's just errant reading comprehension, but to clarify:

    A person on Twitter asked:
    "When you say a potential future pack, do you mean like for The Sims 5?"

    To which Grant replied:
    "No. Focused on Sims 4."

    I notice that when you repeat his answer, you put a comma between "no" and "focused", making his answer one sentence and assuming a deflected answer. This is incorrect. He first answered, "No." Period. As in, "No, I do NOT mean a potential future pack for Sims 5." Then he added, "Focused on Sims 4." As in, "Potential future pack ONLY for Sims 4." His sentence structure made his meaning perfectly clear. It has nothing to do with "wishful thinking" or interpretation.
    You are not remembering his tweets correctly and we can’t discuss this further without finding those tweets to see their exact wording. But he had to repeat many times that TS4 isn’t over and that he still plans to make a lot of more packs for TS4. In the end he even did something as unusual as to talk about packs “for years” even though EA never has done something like that before because EA usually doesn’t allow the devs to talk about unannouced packs at all!
    Also, I don't understand why you expect him to say anything that implies "Sims 5 in a few years" because that was not the question asked, nor has there been any implication whatsoever of even a hint to Sims 5 existing at all. If anything, his firm answer regarding development focus on Sims 4 for years to come, does more to imply that Sims 5 is nowhere near completion, if it's even being developed at all.
    I can’t explain that further without bringing maybe about 20 tweets where he again and again answered questions that were motivated by people’s curiosity about TS4’s future now where TS5 maybe could be announced.
    Furthermore, it doesn't seem to occur to you that your theory about EA "needing a new Sims game every five years because new young simmers can't buy all of the packs to a full game and they are the most important customers" might be completely wrong. Especially when all evidence currently points to the fact that Sims 4 is doing extremely well with sales and is, in fact, growing its player base and new Simmers are joining in on Sims 4 just fine. Which is why EA has decided to have the devs be more active on Twitter, (a social media network popular to younger generations), to engage the new generation of Simmers and to promote The Sims 4 and the new Seasons expansion. Remember, Seasons was only announced one month before its release date, which is very different from how EPs were handled before. So EA has decided on a new strategy to use twitter to market the expansions in a shorter time period. EA is also now interested in what these new Simmers want for Sims 4, so Grant, the lead producer, is taking polls and suggestions in order to continue full speed ahead with years more of development. Grant even stated it himself that they are indeed planning Sims 4 content for years to come. This is not "wishful thinking", this is actual factual statements from the lead producer himself.

    You ask why the devs have suddenly appeared on Twitter but you keep avoiding the most obvious answer: EA wants to continue to market Sims 4 to new Simmers because that's where the money is. Things are different for this era of The Sims. The game hasn't even reached its peak yet, but it is gaining momentum and more players join every day. There are brand new EA programs for Game Changers and there's Fan Kits now, and merchandise, and Sims 4 is more sensationalized than ever. This is Sims 4 in its heyday and there is no room for Sims 5 right now. It might be in development but it's very unlikely to be anywhere near ready to release. And if it were, It would only bring competition to its own profits, which is bad business. EA wouldn't risk releasing a competitor and dividing its own fanbase by making them choose which game to support. If you think parents have trouble buying their kids a Sims game with lots of extra packs, why in the world then, would they support two Sims games with lots of packs? By your own logic, the parents wouldn't support it. Especially if their young Simmer was already invested in the first game.

    There is more evidence against Sims 5 coming out anytime soon than there is to justify it's existence. It would be a bad business move by EA and they wouldn't compete with their own game in its prime, no matter how different the "new" model is. If anything, that is wishful thinking.
    It seems that I can’t convince people that EA just doesn’t want to lose millions of new simmers who would be forced to only play free mobile Sims games for years if EA didn’t release a new big PC Sims game for them.

    The interesting question is for me instead why EA released the Sims Mobile when EA already had the Sims Freeplay? People expected the Sims Mobile to replace Freeplay. But this doesn’t seem to be EA’s plan at all. Also the Sims Mobile is an extremely small and repetitive game where you only play 2-4 adult sims in one house and do almost the same quests over and over. So I actually doubt that simmers will play it for years like they have done with the Sims Freeplay. Therefore I now suspect EA to have planned the Sims Mobile mostly just as an introduction for the next big Sims game.

    Has it ever occured to you that you cannot convince anyone because you might just be...wrong?

    @LiELF honestly don't bother. I don't think this person even really cares about facts that don't support his vision.
    I am just not a dreaming simmer who (as simmers always have) just hope the the current basegame still will get more packs forever. It hasn’t ever become true and simmers have always become disappointed or angry when they have realized this (3 times now and soon for the fourth time too).
    Again though @Erpe
    Grant is almost always only active on Twitter before an EP releases. It's not out of the blue. It's actually been a convincing sign to many that an EP was coming.
    Also, many gurus became more active because the absence of a CM and a few layoffs made everyone very uncomfortable about the future of TS4. They came on to tell us that usually a CM would be interacting with us to avoid them sharing anything they're not allowed to but that they still wanted to soothe our fears.

    None of that is out of the blue.

    Don't tell @LiELF that she's the one not remembering the wording of a tweet correctly, when you fit tweets and facts into alternate timelines just so you can use them to tell us TS5 will be announced at E3. Oh oops, sorry, Gamescom now -_-
    The gurus went on twitter early in May 2018 at almost the same time as Kate became the new CM. But Seasons wasn’t announced until much later. Instead the gurus just again and again wrote that “TS4 isn’t over!”. They went on and on with this. Then Seasons was announced. But then they instead had to write again and again that Seasons wouldn’t become the last pack for TS4. Then they had to change that to “Seasons won’t be the last EP!” And then Grant had to strengthen that again by writing that he expect to make packs for years.

    The unusual thing here is that everybody suspected that TS5 soon would be announced and could be released next year. But instead the Gurus only talked about TS4 packs which people didn’t understand until they got Grant to answer that all those packs would be for TS4 and not for TS5. This stopped people because they didn’t have fantasy enough to imagine that TS4 still will get packs after the release of TS5. So they made it easy for the gurus to avoid questions about for how long time the announcement and release of TS5 will be delayed?

    Simmers are (as I have written) naive dreamers who prefer wishful thinking instead of asking about things that they fear could happen (such as TS5) ;)
  • SimTrippySimTrippy Posts: 7,651 Member
    edited June 2018
    Erpe wrote: »
    SimTrippy wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    LiELF wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    jackjack_k wrote: »
    @Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    @catloverplayer The Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile didn’t fail! Actually they were the first mobile Sims games that didn’t fail like the mobile versions of TS2, TS3 and the Sims Medieval all did - and exactly because TSF and TSM were online multiplayer games! ;)

    I don’t know if TS5 will fail or not because we don’t know anything about it yet (except that it has been in development since 2014 and almost certainly is multiplayer). Most likely it will be very different from the earlier big Sims games but still get packs and DLC.

    But I know that the small group of hardcore veteran simmers (maybe about a thousand?) in this forum are hard to convince because they just refuse the fact that they aren’t even in the target group for the big Sims games which instead are the millions of new young casual simmers who buy the huge majority of the games. (Therefore the gurus ignore this forum and use twitter instead.)

    Neither of those games are multiplayer, at least not in any way that would qualify a PC game as multiplayer. Both of those games are also free to install, and for the most part free to play.

    EA tried multiplayer with this game and it didn’t work out. I don’t know why you are basing your prediction for the sequel on mobile games, or a speculative “new group of casual simmers“. You don’t know who is installing those apps, or buying this game; for all you know there could be considerable overlap.
    EA tried rain and weather in the Sims 2 basegame. But it didn’t work out. The game became unstable and it was raining inside the houses. So EA just gave up and decided never to include weather in the Sims games, right?

    We all know that this wasn’t what happened. EA planned multiplayer for TS4 and for SimCity 2013. But when SimCity 2013 was released EA saw that multiplayer had been made in the wrong way and there wasn’t enough time to make it better in TS4. Therefore TS4 didn’t become a multiplayer game anyway. But EA then gave up and removed multiplayer from all its PC games? No, of course not! Instead EA began making TS5 and give it an improved multiplayer part that didn’t have the same problems.

    There are a huge number of ways to make multiplayer games and I don’t understand why it isn’t multiplayer when I am visiting cities belonging to my friends in the Sims Freeplay or let my sims become friends with sims that are owned by other simmers in any of the two mobile games??

    The two mobile games aren’t identical and in the Sims Mobile we can’t even visit cities belonging to other simmers as we can in Freeplay. TS5 will likely have multiplayer in a third way which I can’t guess yet. Maybe we can visit cities belonging to other simmers or maybe we can’t. Maybe we can invite sims belonging to other simmers like in the Sims Mobile. Maybe TS5 will be real-time too even though I doubt it. Maybe TS5 will require an Internet connection all the time or maybe it like so many multiplayer games can be played offline too. We just don’t know yet. But that EA should throw millions of dollars away by ignoring the huge minority of new young simmers just to please a few thousand older veteran simmers who want packs for TS4 in at least 20 more years isn’t within the real world no matter how hard you fight to convince me that EA care more about veteran simmers than about money ;):D

    There is no Sims 5. Please stop spreading information that there is. Until they confirm it, it’s not coming. Grant has already replied to people on Twitter than TS5 isn’t coming.
    Don’t lie! Grant has instead been very careful not to say anything about TS5 at all!

    The only time he ever has mentioned TS5 was when somebody asked him if the EPs he plans making are for TS5? Then he answered “No, they are for TS4.” But once more he just omitted the natural continuation which of course would have been ”..because TS5 won’t be released for a couple of years.” So don’t lie! Just because EA hasn’t yet told us which Sims games EA will release in the future this doesn’t mean that EA has said that they never ever will release a new Sims game again!
    And the majority of new Simmers have also disliked the idea of online. There have been several polls on various sites with people saying they don’t want an online game.
    Nevertheless EA released both the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile anyway!

    There had also been several polls that showed that TS1 simmers didn’t want TS2 because they wanted more EPs for TS1 instead. But EA released TS2 anyway and I still remember how extremely angry almost all TS1 became.

    Then it became the Sims 2 simmers who hated the idea about TS3 and wanted many more EPs for TS2. But EA just released TS3 after 5 years anyway.

    Then it became the Sims 3 simmers who hated the idea about TS4 and many of them still refuse to play TS4 at all. But after 5 years EA released TS4 anyway.

    Now (for the fourth time) the current simmers (who now play TS4) hate the idea about TS5 and demand more EPs for TS4 instead. But for the fourth time they won’t be able to stop EA from announcing and releasing TS5 which likely again has been in development since 2014.

    The only thing that is new is that the Sims 4 simmers seem to have been able to make EA release more packs even after the release of TS5 which shows me that TS5 must be an online multiplayer game because such games usually have a much longer life than offline games have. (World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and still get new content now 14 years later.)

    So no! I don’t doubt that TS5 is about to be announced this summer. You may be right that most Sims 4 simmers won’t like it and won’t buy it very soon because EA seems to expect that too. But it will be the game for all the young new simmers who now only have the mobile Sims games to play.

    What I am most curious about is if EA really wants TS5 be based on subscriptions in a way similar to how World of Warcraft works? EA Access could be used for that. But exactly how EA will do it we just don’t know yet.

    Ask yourself why Grant so many times just has repeated that TS4 isn’t dead and still has a lot of planned content when he instead just could have said: “We are not ready to switch to Sims 5 for at least a couple more years. So don’t worry about TS4! It will still be our main Sims games for more years!” Why was it so important for him not to say that and to avoid mentioning TS5 at all??

    I think one of the problems here is that you keep reading Grant's quote in the wrong context. Maybe it's a language barrier, maybe it's just errant reading comprehension, but to clarify:

    A person on Twitter asked:
    "When you say a potential future pack, do you mean like for The Sims 5?"

    To which Grant replied:
    "No. Focused on Sims 4."

    I notice that when you repeat his answer, you put a comma between "no" and "focused", making his answer one sentence and assuming a deflected answer. This is incorrect. He first answered, "No." Period. As in, "No, I do NOT mean a potential future pack for Sims 5." Then he added, "Focused on Sims 4." As in, "Potential future pack ONLY for Sims 4." His sentence structure made his meaning perfectly clear. It has nothing to do with "wishful thinking" or interpretation.
    You are not remembering his tweets correctly and we can’t discuss this further without finding those tweets to see their exact wording. But he had to repeat many times that TS4 isn’t over and that he still plans to make a lot of more packs for TS4. In the end he even did something as unusual as to talk about packs “for years” even though EA never has done something like that before because EA usually doesn’t allow the devs to talk about unannouced packs at all!
    Also, I don't understand why you expect him to say anything that implies "Sims 5 in a few years" because that was not the question asked, nor has there been any implication whatsoever of even a hint to Sims 5 existing at all. If anything, his firm answer regarding development focus on Sims 4 for years to come, does more to imply that Sims 5 is nowhere near completion, if it's even being developed at all.
    I can’t explain that further without bringing maybe about 20 tweets where he again and again answered questions that were motivated by people’s curiosity about TS4’s future now where TS5 maybe could be announced.
    Furthermore, it doesn't seem to occur to you that your theory about EA "needing a new Sims game every five years because new young simmers can't buy all of the packs to a full game and they are the most important customers" might be completely wrong. Especially when all evidence currently points to the fact that Sims 4 is doing extremely well with sales and is, in fact, growing its player base and new Simmers are joining in on Sims 4 just fine. Which is why EA has decided to have the devs be more active on Twitter, (a social media network popular to younger generations), to engage the new generation of Simmers and to promote The Sims 4 and the new Seasons expansion. Remember, Seasons was only announced one month before its release date, which is very different from how EPs were handled before. So EA has decided on a new strategy to use twitter to market the expansions in a shorter time period. EA is also now interested in what these new Simmers want for Sims 4, so Grant, the lead producer, is taking polls and suggestions in order to continue full speed ahead with years more of development. Grant even stated it himself that they are indeed planning Sims 4 content for years to come. This is not "wishful thinking", this is actual factual statements from the lead producer himself.

    You ask why the devs have suddenly appeared on Twitter but you keep avoiding the most obvious answer: EA wants to continue to market Sims 4 to new Simmers because that's where the money is. Things are different for this era of The Sims. The game hasn't even reached its peak yet, but it is gaining momentum and more players join every day. There are brand new EA programs for Game Changers and there's Fan Kits now, and merchandise, and Sims 4 is more sensationalized than ever. This is Sims 4 in its heyday and there is no room for Sims 5 right now. It might be in development but it's very unlikely to be anywhere near ready to release. And if it were, It would only bring competition to its own profits, which is bad business. EA wouldn't risk releasing a competitor and dividing its own fanbase by making them choose which game to support. If you think parents have trouble buying their kids a Sims game with lots of extra packs, why in the world then, would they support two Sims games with lots of packs? By your own logic, the parents wouldn't support it. Especially if their young Simmer was already invested in the first game.

    There is more evidence against Sims 5 coming out anytime soon than there is to justify it's existence. It would be a bad business move by EA and they wouldn't compete with their own game in its prime, no matter how different the "new" model is. If anything, that is wishful thinking.
    It seems that I can’t convince people that EA just doesn’t want to lose millions of new simmers who would be forced to only play free mobile Sims games for years if EA didn’t release a new big PC Sims game for them.

    The interesting question is for me instead why EA released the Sims Mobile when EA already had the Sims Freeplay? People expected the Sims Mobile to replace Freeplay. But this doesn’t seem to be EA’s plan at all. Also the Sims Mobile is an extremely small and repetitive game where you only play 2-4 adult sims in one house and do almost the same quests over and over. So I actually doubt that simmers will play it for years like they have done with the Sims Freeplay. Therefore I now suspect EA to have planned the Sims Mobile mostly just as an introduction for the next big Sims game.

    Has it ever occured to you that you cannot convince anyone because you might just be...wrong?

    @LiELF honestly don't bother. I don't think this person even really cares about facts that don't support his vision.
    I am just not a dreaming simmer who (as simmers always have) just hope the the current basegame still will get more packs forever. It hasn’t ever become true and simmers have always become disappointed or angry when they have realized this (3 times now and soon for the fourth time too).
    Again though @Erpe
    Grant is almost always only active on Twitter before an EP releases. It's not out of the blue. It's actually been a convincing sign to many that an EP was coming.
    Also, many gurus became more active because the absence of a CM and a few layoffs made everyone very uncomfortable about the future of TS4. They came on to tell us that usually a CM would be interacting with us to avoid them sharing anything they're not allowed to but that they still wanted to soothe our fears.

    None of that is out of the blue.

    Don't tell @LiELF that she's the one not remembering the wording of a tweet correctly, when you fit tweets and facts into alternate timelines just so you can use them to tell us TS5 will be announced at E3. Oh oops, sorry, Gamescom now -_-
    The gurus went on twitter early in May 2018 at almost the same time as Kate became the new CM. But Seasons wasn’t announced until much later. Instead the gurus just again and again wrote that “TS4 isn’t over!”. They went on and on with this. Then Seasons was announced. But then they instead had to write again and again that Seasons wouldn’t become the last pack for TS4. Then they had to change that to “Seasons won’t be the last EP!” And then Grant had to strengthen that again by writing that he expect to make packs for years.

    The unusual thing here is that everybody suspected that TS5 soon would be announced and could be released next year. But instead the Gurus only talked about TS4 packs which people didn’t understand until they got Grant to answer that all those packs would be for TS4 and not for TS5. This stopped people because they didn’t have fantasy enough to imagine that TS4 still will get packs after the release of TS5. So they made it easy for the gurus to avoid questions about for how long time the announcement and release of TS5 will be delayed?

    Simmers are (as I have written) naive dreamers who prefer wishful thinking instead of asking about things that they fear could happen (such as TS5) ;)

    You're wrong, it was shortly before Kate was there, precisely because she wasn't there yet. Heck they even made a Forum post about it. Did you...read it?

    Anyway trust me I won't be getting into this with you today. No one's ever said it will last forever, just that it'll probably last longer than next year.

    @simgirl1010 I'm looking forward to it! I wonder what reasons we'll hear if it doesn't happen given his deep insight into "what EA thinks / believes / knows / says"
  • simgirl1010simgirl1010 Posts: 35,708 Member
    edited June 2018
    Nope, but they’ll announce a Game Pack instead.
    Erpe wrote: »
    SimTrippy wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    LiELF wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    jackjack_k wrote: »
    @Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    @catloverplayer The Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile didn’t fail! Actually they were the first mobile Sims games that didn’t fail like the mobile versions of TS2, TS3 and the Sims Medieval all did - and exactly because TSF and TSM were online multiplayer games! ;)

    I don’t know if TS5 will fail or not because we don’t know anything about it yet (except that it has been in development since 2014 and almost certainly is multiplayer). Most likely it will be very different from the earlier big Sims games but still get packs and DLC.

    But I know that the small group of hardcore veteran simmers (maybe about a thousand?) in this forum are hard to convince because they just refuse the fact that they aren’t even in the target group for the big Sims games which instead are the millions of new young casual simmers who buy the huge majority of the games. (Therefore the gurus ignore this forum and use twitter instead.)

    Neither of those games are multiplayer, at least not in any way that would qualify a PC game as multiplayer. Both of those games are also free to install, and for the most part free to play.

    EA tried multiplayer with this game and it didn’t work out. I don’t know why you are basing your prediction for the sequel on mobile games, or a speculative “new group of casual simmers“. You don’t know who is installing those apps, or buying this game; for all you know there could be considerable overlap.
    EA tried rain and weather in the Sims 2 basegame. But it didn’t work out. The game became unstable and it was raining inside the houses. So EA just gave up and decided never to include weather in the Sims games, right?

    We all know that this wasn’t what happened. EA planned multiplayer for TS4 and for SimCity 2013. But when SimCity 2013 was released EA saw that multiplayer had been made in the wrong way and there wasn’t enough time to make it better in TS4. Therefore TS4 didn’t become a multiplayer game anyway. But EA then gave up and removed multiplayer from all its PC games? No, of course not! Instead EA began making TS5 and give it an improved multiplayer part that didn’t have the same problems.

    There are a huge number of ways to make multiplayer games and I don’t understand why it isn’t multiplayer when I am visiting cities belonging to my friends in the Sims Freeplay or let my sims become friends with sims that are owned by other simmers in any of the two mobile games??

    The two mobile games aren’t identical and in the Sims Mobile we can’t even visit cities belonging to other simmers as we can in Freeplay. TS5 will likely have multiplayer in a third way which I can’t guess yet. Maybe we can visit cities belonging to other simmers or maybe we can’t. Maybe we can invite sims belonging to other simmers like in the Sims Mobile. Maybe TS5 will be real-time too even though I doubt it. Maybe TS5 will require an Internet connection all the time or maybe it like so many multiplayer games can be played offline too. We just don’t know yet. But that EA should throw millions of dollars away by ignoring the huge minority of new young simmers just to please a few thousand older veteran simmers who want packs for TS4 in at least 20 more years isn’t within the real world no matter how hard you fight to convince me that EA care more about veteran simmers than about money ;):D

    There is no Sims 5. Please stop spreading information that there is. Until they confirm it, it’s not coming. Grant has already replied to people on Twitter than TS5 isn’t coming.
    Don’t lie! Grant has instead been very careful not to say anything about TS5 at all!

    The only time he ever has mentioned TS5 was when somebody asked him if the EPs he plans making are for TS5? Then he answered “No, they are for TS4.” But once more he just omitted the natural continuation which of course would have been ”..because TS5 won’t be released for a couple of years.” So don’t lie! Just because EA hasn’t yet told us which Sims games EA will release in the future this doesn’t mean that EA has said that they never ever will release a new Sims game again!
    And the majority of new Simmers have also disliked the idea of online. There have been several polls on various sites with people saying they don’t want an online game.
    Nevertheless EA released both the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile anyway!

    There had also been several polls that showed that TS1 simmers didn’t want TS2 because they wanted more EPs for TS1 instead. But EA released TS2 anyway and I still remember how extremely angry almost all TS1 became.

    Then it became the Sims 2 simmers who hated the idea about TS3 and wanted many more EPs for TS2. But EA just released TS3 after 5 years anyway.

    Then it became the Sims 3 simmers who hated the idea about TS4 and many of them still refuse to play TS4 at all. But after 5 years EA released TS4 anyway.

    Now (for the fourth time) the current simmers (who now play TS4) hate the idea about TS5 and demand more EPs for TS4 instead. But for the fourth time they won’t be able to stop EA from announcing and releasing TS5 which likely again has been in development since 2014.

    The only thing that is new is that the Sims 4 simmers seem to have been able to make EA release more packs even after the release of TS5 which shows me that TS5 must be an online multiplayer game because such games usually have a much longer life than offline games have. (World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and still get new content now 14 years later.)

    So no! I don’t doubt that TS5 is about to be announced this summer. You may be right that most Sims 4 simmers won’t like it and won’t buy it very soon because EA seems to expect that too. But it will be the game for all the young new simmers who now only have the mobile Sims games to play.

    What I am most curious about is if EA really wants TS5 be based on subscriptions in a way similar to how World of Warcraft works? EA Access could be used for that. But exactly how EA will do it we just don’t know yet.

    Ask yourself why Grant so many times just has repeated that TS4 isn’t dead and still has a lot of planned content when he instead just could have said: “We are not ready to switch to Sims 5 for at least a couple more years. So don’t worry about TS4! It will still be our main Sims games for more years!” Why was it so important for him not to say that and to avoid mentioning TS5 at all??

    I think one of the problems here is that you keep reading Grant's quote in the wrong context. Maybe it's a language barrier, maybe it's just errant reading comprehension, but to clarify:

    A person on Twitter asked:
    "When you say a potential future pack, do you mean like for The Sims 5?"

    To which Grant replied:
    "No. Focused on Sims 4."

    I notice that when you repeat his answer, you put a comma between "no" and "focused", making his answer one sentence and assuming a deflected answer. This is incorrect. He first answered, "No." Period. As in, "No, I do NOT mean a potential future pack for Sims 5." Then he added, "Focused on Sims 4." As in, "Potential future pack ONLY for Sims 4." His sentence structure made his meaning perfectly clear. It has nothing to do with "wishful thinking" or interpretation.
    You are not remembering his tweets correctly and we can’t discuss this further without finding those tweets to see their exact wording. But he had to repeat many times that TS4 isn’t over and that he still plans to make a lot of more packs for TS4. In the end he even did something as unusual as to talk about packs “for years” even though EA never has done something like that before because EA usually doesn’t allow the devs to talk about unannouced packs at all!
    Also, I don't understand why you expect him to say anything that implies "Sims 5 in a few years" because that was not the question asked, nor has there been any implication whatsoever of even a hint to Sims 5 existing at all. If anything, his firm answer regarding development focus on Sims 4 for years to come, does more to imply that Sims 5 is nowhere near completion, if it's even being developed at all.
    I can’t explain that further without bringing maybe about 20 tweets where he again and again answered questions that were motivated by people’s curiosity about TS4’s future now where TS5 maybe could be announced.
    Furthermore, it doesn't seem to occur to you that your theory about EA "needing a new Sims game every five years because new young simmers can't buy all of the packs to a full game and they are the most important customers" might be completely wrong. Especially when all evidence currently points to the fact that Sims 4 is doing extremely well with sales and is, in fact, growing its player base and new Simmers are joining in on Sims 4 just fine. Which is why EA has decided to have the devs be more active on Twitter, (a social media network popular to younger generations), to engage the new generation of Simmers and to promote The Sims 4 and the new Seasons expansion. Remember, Seasons was only announced one month before its release date, which is very different from how EPs were handled before. So EA has decided on a new strategy to use twitter to market the expansions in a shorter time period. EA is also now interested in what these new Simmers want for Sims 4, so Grant, the lead producer, is taking polls and suggestions in order to continue full speed ahead with years more of development. Grant even stated it himself that they are indeed planning Sims 4 content for years to come. This is not "wishful thinking", this is actual factual statements from the lead producer himself.

    You ask why the devs have suddenly appeared on Twitter but you keep avoiding the most obvious answer: EA wants to continue to market Sims 4 to new Simmers because that's where the money is. Things are different for this era of The Sims. The game hasn't even reached its peak yet, but it is gaining momentum and more players join every day. There are brand new EA programs for Game Changers and there's Fan Kits now, and merchandise, and Sims 4 is more sensationalized than ever. This is Sims 4 in its heyday and there is no room for Sims 5 right now. It might be in development but it's very unlikely to be anywhere near ready to release. And if it were, It would only bring competition to its own profits, which is bad business. EA wouldn't risk releasing a competitor and dividing its own fanbase by making them choose which game to support. If you think parents have trouble buying their kids a Sims game with lots of extra packs, why in the world then, would they support two Sims games with lots of packs? By your own logic, the parents wouldn't support it. Especially if their young Simmer was already invested in the first game.

    There is more evidence against Sims 5 coming out anytime soon than there is to justify it's existence. It would be a bad business move by EA and they wouldn't compete with their own game in its prime, no matter how different the "new" model is. If anything, that is wishful thinking.
    It seems that I can’t convince people that EA just doesn’t want to lose millions of new simmers who would be forced to only play free mobile Sims games for years if EA didn’t release a new big PC Sims game for them.

    The interesting question is for me instead why EA released the Sims Mobile when EA already had the Sims Freeplay? People expected the Sims Mobile to replace Freeplay. But this doesn’t seem to be EA’s plan at all. Also the Sims Mobile is an extremely small and repetitive game where you only play 2-4 adult sims in one house and do almost the same quests over and over. So I actually doubt that simmers will play it for years like they have done with the Sims Freeplay. Therefore I now suspect EA to have planned the Sims Mobile mostly just as an introduction for the next big Sims game.

    Has it ever occured to you that you cannot convince anyone because you might just be...wrong?

    @LiELF honestly don't bother. I don't think this person even really cares about facts that don't support his vision.
    I am just not a dreaming simmer who (as simmers always have) just hope the the current basegame still will get more packs forever. It hasn’t ever become true and simmers have always become disappointed or angry when they have realized this (3 times now and soon for the fourth time too).
    Again though @Erpe
    Grant is almost always only active on Twitter before an EP releases. It's not out of the blue. It's actually been a convincing sign to many that an EP was coming.
    Also, many gurus became more active because the absence of a CM and a few layoffs made everyone very uncomfortable about the future of TS4. They came on to tell us that usually a CM would be interacting with us to avoid them sharing anything they're not allowed to but that they still wanted to soothe our fears.

    None of that is out of the blue.

    Don't tell @LiELF that she's the one not remembering the wording of a tweet correctly, when you fit tweets and facts into alternate timelines just so you can use them to tell us TS5 will be announced at E3. Oh oops, sorry, Gamescom now -_-
    The gurus went on twitter early in May 2018 at almost the same time as Kate became the new CM. But Seasons wasn’t announced until much later. Instead the gurus just again and again wrote that “TS4 isn’t over!”. They went on and on with this. Then Seasons was announced. But then they instead had to write again and again that Seasons wouldn’t become the last pack for TS4. Then they had to change that to “Seasons won’t be the last EP!” And then Grant had to strengthen that again by writing that he expect to make packs for years.

    The unusual thing here is that everybody suspected that TS5 soon would be announced and could be released next year. But instead the Gurus only talked about TS4 packs which people didn’t understand until they got Grant to answer that all those packs would be for TS4 and not for TS5. This stopped people because they didn’t have fantasy enough to imagine that TS4 still will get packs after the release of TS5. So they made it easy for the gurus to avoid questions about for how long time the announcement and release of TS5 will be delayed?

    Simmers are (as I have written) naive dreamers who prefer wishful thinking instead of asking about things that they fear could happen (such as TS5) ;)

    First step for someone without any factual evidence to support their views? Name-calling.

    ETA: i don't fear the coming of the Sims 5 but who are we supposed to ask? You? ;)
  • jackjack_kjackjack_k Posts: 8,601 Member
    edited June 2018
    Yep, but it will be a few months till we get details.
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    IceyJ wrote: »
    @Erpe "Also the reason why people kept asking about TS4 being over was because they expected TS5 soon to be announced and therefore doubted that TS4 really would get many more packs."

    No, this wasn't the reason. It's because of the panic that ensued when a previous Guru on Reddit claimed that there was no development on The Sims 5 and that EA was shifting The Sims towards mobile. The natural assumption was that the game was ending. It didn't help that during that time, several gurus were fired, some were moved to mobile and EA wasn't communicating with us due to not having a community manager. That's when Graham stepped in to calm things down, and eventually Grant.
    The Reddit message was obviously from a simmer and not from a former guru! That was easy to see by the way it was written. So I doubt that this false message really created much panic.

    Also it would have been much easier for Grant and the gurus to just state that the reddit message was false instead of writing a huge number of messages on twitter about TS4 still getting a lot more new content (and even for years).

    But the gurus had to make simmers believe that TS4 isn’t over when TS5 (or what it will be called) soon will be announced. The problem wasn’t mainly the hardcore simmers in this forum though but the millions of casual simmers elsewhere. Therefore the gurus went on twitter to prepare all those simmers for the announcement of a new big Sims game hoping that they then would spread the information that TS4 isn’t over anyway.

    If you were online at all during that time, you would know that the message did create much panic. But it wasn't just the message alone, it was a combination of things.

    Maybe they didn't state that it was false because it wasn't? If you check the Reddit user's history, you'll see that he had some inside knowledge about the game. I believe him.

    All I can say is, start preparing those excuses you're going to need when The Sims 5 does not get announced. :*

    I don’t know exactly why he suddenly wrote that he was a former SimGuru. But it wasn’t true. He was just a long time fan of the Sims game instead (and maybe felt that he knew enough about the Sims games to see himself as some kind of guru).

    So basically what you’ve been doing here? I mean, you sure like to talk a lot about EA’s future plans for The Sims like you were in the room and know what’s going on behind the scenes.
    So you too think that EA just makes decisions at random and plans to just throw hundreds of millions of dollars away by switching it’s very profitable PC Sims games out with the much less profitable mobile Sims games ;):D

    EA has made many mobile Sims games earlier and also some Sims games for consoles. But before the Sims Freeplay and TS4 those Sims games for other platforms earned so little money that EA soon withdraw them from the market while all the PC Sims games earned huge profit to EA (and especially from all the extra packs that EA released).

    Mobile games similar to the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile are made by many other game companies too. But those game companies usually also release them in version for PCs because this is very cheap to do and increases their income. But EA only release the Sims Freeplay for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, WebOS, BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone. That is a lot of platforms. But where are the versions for Mac and Windows PC? Those PC versions would cost almost nothing to make. But EA wouldn’t make them because EA feared that they then would steal customers from the many times more profitable Sims 3 and Sims 4 games and packs!

    So no. You can’t convince me that EA cares so little about losing hundreds of millions of dollars by switching from the many times more profitable PC platforms to the many times less profitable mobile platforms (even though EA now finally have found a way to earn just a little profit from mobile Sims games too)! The PC platform is still the most profitable platform ever even though EA now has found a way to make packs too for a console port of the PC game and thus earn money that way too.

    I’ve actually never said that.

    I’m kind of going to gloss over most of this post, because you have made a huge error in your second paragraph. More specifically in your statement regarding the mobile games; there were a total of 5 Sims titles developed and released for iOS (TS3, TS3:World Adventures, TS3:Ambitions, TS: Medieval, and TS: Freeplay) between 2009 and 2011. The paid apps were not removed from the iOS AppStore until 2015, a year after The Sims 4 released on PC. I don’t know what you consider to be “soon”, but 4-6 years is a significant chunk of time to bring in money. Because, again, 4 of those 5 games cost money to even download and also featured micro transactions for additional in-game content. If those apps were not making enough money to be of any value to EA they would have pulled them, but instead they made more... because they were more profitable than you think. Do they make PC scale money? No, but no one has said they did. PC Sims makes nothing compared to other EA owned franchises, but that hasn’t stopped them from making more Sims games has it?
    I bought those mobile games out of curiosity because I actually loved both the Sims 3 World Adventures and the Sims Medieval in the PC versions. So I also tried several times to get into the mobile versions of those games (and also the Sims 3 for iOS). But I never managed to. All those games were boring in the mobile versions and only sold a little because simmers loved the PC versions and therefore wanted to try the mobile versions too.

    Paid mobile games don’t always have short lives. An example is Plague Inc which was released as a paid game for iOS 3 years ago but still is on the top 3 list for paid iOS games. But the problem with all the paid mobile Sims games has always been that they were just hugely simplified versions of the PC games and also very different even though they were given the same names to make simmers think that they maybe were worth buying - which they usually weren’t.

    The Sims Medieval was actually also released for Windows Phone but as late as 2013. But both Medieval and the 3 mobile Sims 3 games sold so little that they soon were withdrawn from the app stores - and without EA ever releasing a mobile version of TS4 anyway!

    I don’t know if EA really lost money on those mobile games. But EA surely didn’t earn much money on them either. So now EA doesn’t make paid games for mobile devices anymore.

    The console games had about the same problem until EA found a way to port TS4 and its packs to consoles and not just make simplified Sims games without packs for consoles too.

    Windows phone was an utter failure, don’t base anything on that or it’s app sales/performance. Console gets packs because of their design, which is better than what previous console hardware could handle. It has absolutely nothing to do with EA figuring out how to do it, it was on Sony/Microsoft.
    No, it was Blind Squirrel Games who developed a new technic to port PC games to consoles. This got EA interested and at a very late state of TS4’s development EA therefore negotiated with BSG to let them port TS4 to consoles:

    Do you have app sales data? You can’t speak to the performance of any of those apps because you don’t actually know. Stop making up facts and presenting them in this argument, it’s not working out there way you are hoping.
    No, I don’t have the app sales data. But unlike you I don’t think that EA just makes decisions at random and promote bad selling games or stops making well selling games. But you seem to think that the decisions to not make a paid mobile version of TS4 and not making a simplified console version already in 2014 were just taken by throwing a dice a couple of times ;)

    Erpe just stop now. The studio porting games to console was contracted by EA for the sole purpose of porting the games to console. The Sims is EA property, no one is authorized to do anything with it unless they are contracted by EA to do so. Also, porting games is not a new technique - it’s done for all kinds of games on all kinds of platforms. Why didn’t PS3/XB360 get ‘packs’? Because the systems themselves could not handle the full PC game, let alone full downloadable content packs. The current generation of consoles are more capable in that regard, and as such can handle the full game and it’s subsequent releases.
    So now you just want to “win” this discussion by misquoting and claiming that it was you who said what I said??

    I am not interested in “winning” and you know very well that it was me and not you who said that Blind Squirrel Games was hired to port the game to consoles because BSG had developed a new technic to port PC games to consoles! You can see a list of the games they have ported on http://blindsquirrelentertainment.com/category/press-releases/ and the games are from many different game companies!

    Of course they cooperated with EA devs too because they didn’t develop the game and only ported it. They are the experts in converting the code and the controls from keyboard and mouse to the controls for consoles. But they need help from EA when this requires adjustments to the gameplay too. Therefore there are also EA employees involved in the Sims 4 for consoles - and no, BSG doesn’t get the right to use the game code for any other purpose than to just do those ports to Xbox and PlayStation!
    Also I have already reiterated that you are making assumptions on my thinking with things that only you have said. Of course EA doesn’t do things at random, that isn’t how it works. Paid apps are not the current trend, free-to-play are. Why would EA utilize a business model from nearly 10 years ago when the newer model is more profitable and sustainable in the long run? Again, that only pertains to mobile games. PC games do not work with the freemium business model unless they are upscaled mobile games which The Sims 4 is not. You just admitted that you have no sales data, so how can you continue to say the mobile apps were “bad selling games”? You have no information on that; you said that yourself, so instead of making (objectively bad) assumptions try using a little bit of logic there. Bad selling things do not get made multiple times. A non-successful paid mobile app wouldn’t spawn 3 additional unique versions. Until you have some factual, relevant information you don’t need to respond.
    Because you just are a simmer and don’t want to know anything about how a game company works like I do I have to stop here because you just try to “invent” things to “win” the discussion while I instead just am interested in how things really works (which you aren’t).

    So let us just agree to disagree and wait a couple of months to see if EA doesn’t announce the next big Sims game anyway almost exactly as I have predicted ;)

    Yeah I said EA contracted the studio to port the games to console, don’t distort what I said. I know very well how these things work, which is why I chose to correct the inaccuracies you have presented in multiple of your posts. I am not sure if you are being serious, or trolling but you have, again, failed to produce anything to legitimize your inaccurate statements and have repeatedly distorted my words. I’m not trying to win anything here, this is a public forum. If I see something that is inaccurate being presented as a factual thing I will step in to correct it. It’s not obligatory, but it certainly helps stop the intentional spreading of misinformation.

    I already said you don’t have to respond to me unless you have verified, legitimate information regarding your misstatements. Instead you reiterated what I told you, which is counter productive to the reason I replied to your comment in the first place. You can believe there is a Sims 5 announcement right around the corner, by all means, but there is plenty of verified, official statement that say no it’s not. However in a couple months you will be repeating the same sentiment you are now, for whatever reason because Sims 5 has (according to you) been so close to announcement for months now. How did that EA Play announcement go??

    I don't understand why Erpe is insisting that EA was impressed with Blind Squirrel's porting skills and etc as if they had a prototype built etc.
    The Edge of Reality worked on the Sims 3 console games and arguably did a much better job. The Sims 3 console games in a lot of ways have better performance than their PC counterparts. They entirely pulled apart the game and rebuilt it for console.

    Meanwhile, Blind Squirrel literally added some controller support and shoved it on PS4/Xbox. EA chose the cheapest option when it came to console, there really wasn't anything impressive about TS4's launch on console. It has terrible controls and plays like I plugged my Xbox 360 controller into my PC, and EA provided limited support for it.

    Also, @Erpe is one of those people who doesn't understand the concept of "things change". Nothing about the Sims 4 has been anything like previous Sims games. Yes, the Sims 1 - 3 basically all followed the same patterns, but nothing about 4 has. Even the console release was abnormally delayed. They waited over 3 years to port the game over, they usually do it exactly a year later with almost no fail.

    It's clear the decisions made for The Sims 4 are ones that mean there's no deadline to stop producing content for the Sims 5 release. Everything from 1 EP a year, to making niche packs like Jungle Adventure and Spa Day, to asking Polls about base game content updates, tells us The Sims 4 is here to stay.

    To me, it was clear when The Sims 4 came to Mac. The decision to have EA make the port in-house for Native Mac OS told me EA was investing in The Sims 4 long term. Almost no developers, including EA, even bother with Mac ports, they usually ship them off to third party devs.
    Most AAA games on Mac aren't from the actual devs because it's super expensive to port to Mac, and it's cheaper to get someone else to do it.

    Not only did EA do it in house, they built it as a native program, not a Windows > Mac port. That's a lot of money spent on something to last a couple of years. And the Mac version is even built differently and optimised for Mac OS. Most Mac ports run worse than the Windows counterparts because they are simply ported.

    EA don't like spending money (we've seen that with The Sims 3 Mac port, and even The Sims 3's releases on Wii/3DS etc which are just reskins of the Sims 2 console games with Sims 3 artstyle). The fact that EA spent more money than usually needed says they need The Sims 4 to be a platform that is going to be here for ages and needs to be rebuilt and updated for new OS's.
  • ErpeErpe Posts: 5,872 Member
    Nope, too soon!
    SimTrippy wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    SimTrippy wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    LiELF wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    jackjack_k wrote: »
    @Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    @catloverplayer The Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile didn’t fail! Actually they were the first mobile Sims games that didn’t fail like the mobile versions of TS2, TS3 and the Sims Medieval all did - and exactly because TSF and TSM were online multiplayer games! ;)

    I don’t know if TS5 will fail or not because we don’t know anything about it yet (except that it has been in development since 2014 and almost certainly is multiplayer). Most likely it will be very different from the earlier big Sims games but still get packs and DLC.

    But I know that the small group of hardcore veteran simmers (maybe about a thousand?) in this forum are hard to convince because they just refuse the fact that they aren’t even in the target group for the big Sims games which instead are the millions of new young casual simmers who buy the huge majority of the games. (Therefore the gurus ignore this forum and use twitter instead.)

    Neither of those games are multiplayer, at least not in any way that would qualify a PC game as multiplayer. Both of those games are also free to install, and for the most part free to play.

    EA tried multiplayer with this game and it didn’t work out. I don’t know why you are basing your prediction for the sequel on mobile games, or a speculative “new group of casual simmers“. You don’t know who is installing those apps, or buying this game; for all you know there could be considerable overlap.
    EA tried rain and weather in the Sims 2 basegame. But it didn’t work out. The game became unstable and it was raining inside the houses. So EA just gave up and decided never to include weather in the Sims games, right?

    We all know that this wasn’t what happened. EA planned multiplayer for TS4 and for SimCity 2013. But when SimCity 2013 was released EA saw that multiplayer had been made in the wrong way and there wasn’t enough time to make it better in TS4. Therefore TS4 didn’t become a multiplayer game anyway. But EA then gave up and removed multiplayer from all its PC games? No, of course not! Instead EA began making TS5 and give it an improved multiplayer part that didn’t have the same problems.

    There are a huge number of ways to make multiplayer games and I don’t understand why it isn’t multiplayer when I am visiting cities belonging to my friends in the Sims Freeplay or let my sims become friends with sims that are owned by other simmers in any of the two mobile games??

    The two mobile games aren’t identical and in the Sims Mobile we can’t even visit cities belonging to other simmers as we can in Freeplay. TS5 will likely have multiplayer in a third way which I can’t guess yet. Maybe we can visit cities belonging to other simmers or maybe we can’t. Maybe we can invite sims belonging to other simmers like in the Sims Mobile. Maybe TS5 will be real-time too even though I doubt it. Maybe TS5 will require an Internet connection all the time or maybe it like so many multiplayer games can be played offline too. We just don’t know yet. But that EA should throw millions of dollars away by ignoring the huge minority of new young simmers just to please a few thousand older veteran simmers who want packs for TS4 in at least 20 more years isn’t within the real world no matter how hard you fight to convince me that EA care more about veteran simmers than about money ;):D

    There is no Sims 5. Please stop spreading information that there is. Until they confirm it, it’s not coming. Grant has already replied to people on Twitter than TS5 isn’t coming.
    Don’t lie! Grant has instead been very careful not to say anything about TS5 at all!

    The only time he ever has mentioned TS5 was when somebody asked him if the EPs he plans making are for TS5? Then he answered “No, they are for TS4.” But once more he just omitted the natural continuation which of course would have been ”..because TS5 won’t be released for a couple of years.” So don’t lie! Just because EA hasn’t yet told us which Sims games EA will release in the future this doesn’t mean that EA has said that they never ever will release a new Sims game again!
    And the majority of new Simmers have also disliked the idea of online. There have been several polls on various sites with people saying they don’t want an online game.
    Nevertheless EA released both the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile anyway!

    There had also been several polls that showed that TS1 simmers didn’t want TS2 because they wanted more EPs for TS1 instead. But EA released TS2 anyway and I still remember how extremely angry almost all TS1 became.

    Then it became the Sims 2 simmers who hated the idea about TS3 and wanted many more EPs for TS2. But EA just released TS3 after 5 years anyway.

    Then it became the Sims 3 simmers who hated the idea about TS4 and many of them still refuse to play TS4 at all. But after 5 years EA released TS4 anyway.

    Now (for the fourth time) the current simmers (who now play TS4) hate the idea about TS5 and demand more EPs for TS4 instead. But for the fourth time they won’t be able to stop EA from announcing and releasing TS5 which likely again has been in development since 2014.

    The only thing that is new is that the Sims 4 simmers seem to have been able to make EA release more packs even after the release of TS5 which shows me that TS5 must be an online multiplayer game because such games usually have a much longer life than offline games have. (World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and still get new content now 14 years later.)

    So no! I don’t doubt that TS5 is about to be announced this summer. You may be right that most Sims 4 simmers won’t like it and won’t buy it very soon because EA seems to expect that too. But it will be the game for all the young new simmers who now only have the mobile Sims games to play.

    What I am most curious about is if EA really wants TS5 be based on subscriptions in a way similar to how World of Warcraft works? EA Access could be used for that. But exactly how EA will do it we just don’t know yet.

    Ask yourself why Grant so many times just has repeated that TS4 isn’t dead and still has a lot of planned content when he instead just could have said: “We are not ready to switch to Sims 5 for at least a couple more years. So don’t worry about TS4! It will still be our main Sims games for more years!” Why was it so important for him not to say that and to avoid mentioning TS5 at all??

    I think one of the problems here is that you keep reading Grant's quote in the wrong context. Maybe it's a language barrier, maybe it's just errant reading comprehension, but to clarify:

    A person on Twitter asked:
    "When you say a potential future pack, do you mean like for The Sims 5?"

    To which Grant replied:
    "No. Focused on Sims 4."

    I notice that when you repeat his answer, you put a comma between "no" and "focused", making his answer one sentence and assuming a deflected answer. This is incorrect. He first answered, "No." Period. As in, "No, I do NOT mean a potential future pack for Sims 5." Then he added, "Focused on Sims 4." As in, "Potential future pack ONLY for Sims 4." His sentence structure made his meaning perfectly clear. It has nothing to do with "wishful thinking" or interpretation.
    You are not remembering his tweets correctly and we can’t discuss this further without finding those tweets to see their exact wording. But he had to repeat many times that TS4 isn’t over and that he still plans to make a lot of more packs for TS4. In the end he even did something as unusual as to talk about packs “for years” even though EA never has done something like that before because EA usually doesn’t allow the devs to talk about unannouced packs at all!
    Also, I don't understand why you expect him to say anything that implies "Sims 5 in a few years" because that was not the question asked, nor has there been any implication whatsoever of even a hint to Sims 5 existing at all. If anything, his firm answer regarding development focus on Sims 4 for years to come, does more to imply that Sims 5 is nowhere near completion, if it's even being developed at all.
    I can’t explain that further without bringing maybe about 20 tweets where he again and again answered questions that were motivated by people’s curiosity about TS4’s future now where TS5 maybe could be announced.
    Furthermore, it doesn't seem to occur to you that your theory about EA "needing a new Sims game every five years because new young simmers can't buy all of the packs to a full game and they are the most important customers" might be completely wrong. Especially when all evidence currently points to the fact that Sims 4 is doing extremely well with sales and is, in fact, growing its player base and new Simmers are joining in on Sims 4 just fine. Which is why EA has decided to have the devs be more active on Twitter, (a social media network popular to younger generations), to engage the new generation of Simmers and to promote The Sims 4 and the new Seasons expansion. Remember, Seasons was only announced one month before its release date, which is very different from how EPs were handled before. So EA has decided on a new strategy to use twitter to market the expansions in a shorter time period. EA is also now interested in what these new Simmers want for Sims 4, so Grant, the lead producer, is taking polls and suggestions in order to continue full speed ahead with years more of development. Grant even stated it himself that they are indeed planning Sims 4 content for years to come. This is not "wishful thinking", this is actual factual statements from the lead producer himself.

    You ask why the devs have suddenly appeared on Twitter but you keep avoiding the most obvious answer: EA wants to continue to market Sims 4 to new Simmers because that's where the money is. Things are different for this era of The Sims. The game hasn't even reached its peak yet, but it is gaining momentum and more players join every day. There are brand new EA programs for Game Changers and there's Fan Kits now, and merchandise, and Sims 4 is more sensationalized than ever. This is Sims 4 in its heyday and there is no room for Sims 5 right now. It might be in development but it's very unlikely to be anywhere near ready to release. And if it were, It would only bring competition to its own profits, which is bad business. EA wouldn't risk releasing a competitor and dividing its own fanbase by making them choose which game to support. If you think parents have trouble buying their kids a Sims game with lots of extra packs, why in the world then, would they support two Sims games with lots of packs? By your own logic, the parents wouldn't support it. Especially if their young Simmer was already invested in the first game.

    There is more evidence against Sims 5 coming out anytime soon than there is to justify it's existence. It would be a bad business move by EA and they wouldn't compete with their own game in its prime, no matter how different the "new" model is. If anything, that is wishful thinking.
    It seems that I can’t convince people that EA just doesn’t want to lose millions of new simmers who would be forced to only play free mobile Sims games for years if EA didn’t release a new big PC Sims game for them.

    The interesting question is for me instead why EA released the Sims Mobile when EA already had the Sims Freeplay? People expected the Sims Mobile to replace Freeplay. But this doesn’t seem to be EA’s plan at all. Also the Sims Mobile is an extremely small and repetitive game where you only play 2-4 adult sims in one house and do almost the same quests over and over. So I actually doubt that simmers will play it for years like they have done with the Sims Freeplay. Therefore I now suspect EA to have planned the Sims Mobile mostly just as an introduction for the next big Sims game.

    Has it ever occured to you that you cannot convince anyone because you might just be...wrong?

    @LiELF honestly don't bother. I don't think this person even really cares about facts that don't support his vision.
    I am just not a dreaming simmer who (as simmers always have) just hope the the current basegame still will get more packs forever. It hasn’t ever become true and simmers have always become disappointed or angry when they have realized this (3 times now and soon for the fourth time too).
    Again though @Erpe
    Grant is almost always only active on Twitter before an EP releases. It's not out of the blue. It's actually been a convincing sign to many that an EP was coming.
    Also, many gurus became more active because the absence of a CM and a few layoffs made everyone very uncomfortable about the future of TS4. They came on to tell us that usually a CM would be interacting with us to avoid them sharing anything they're not allowed to but that they still wanted to soothe our fears.

    None of that is out of the blue.

    Don't tell @LiELF that she's the one not remembering the wording of a tweet correctly, when you fit tweets and facts into alternate timelines just so you can use them to tell us TS5 will be announced at E3. Oh oops, sorry, Gamescom now -_-
    The gurus went on twitter early in May 2018 at almost the same time as Kate became the new CM. But Seasons wasn’t announced until much later. Instead the gurus just again and again wrote that “TS4 isn’t over!”. They went on and on with this. Then Seasons was announced. But then they instead had to write again and again that Seasons wouldn’t become the last pack for TS4. Then they had to change that to “Seasons won’t be the last EP!” And then Grant had to strengthen that again by writing that he expect to make packs for years.

    The unusual thing here is that everybody suspected that TS5 soon would be announced and could be released next year. But instead the Gurus only talked about TS4 packs which people didn’t understand until they got Grant to answer that all those packs would be for TS4 and not for TS5. This stopped people because they didn’t have fantasy enough to imagine that TS4 still will get packs after the release of TS5. So they made it easy for the gurus to avoid questions about for how long time the announcement and release of TS5 will be delayed?

    Simmers are (as I have written) naive dreamers who prefer wishful thinking instead of asking about things that they fear could happen (such as TS5) ;)

    You're wrong, it was shortly before Kate was there, precisely because she wasn't there yet. Heck they even made a Forum post about it. Did you...read it?

    Anyway trust me I won't be getting into this with you today. No one's ever said it will last forever, just that it'll probably last longer than next year.
    Why don’t any of you just ask Grant on twitter? You only have to find the tweet where he says that he expect to make packs for TS4 for years and then answer: “Does this mean that TS5 won’t be released in the next couple of years?” But you are all so scared for his answer that you don’t dare to write that question. ;)

    I would likely have asked him that myself if I could do it here in the forum. But I am not using my twitter account for such things and am not curious enough to make a new twitter account just for that.
    @simgirl1010 I'm looking forward to it! I wonder what reasons we'll hear if it doesn't happen given his deep insight into "what EA thinks / believes / knows / says"
    I will just accept that the announcement of TS5 then was postponed more than I had expected. There could of course be reasons for EA to do that. But I am not a simmer who am too scared to even ask Grant about what he means. Just not interested enough ;)
  • SimTrippySimTrippy Posts: 7,651 Member
    edited June 2018
    Erpe wrote: »
    SimTrippy wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    SimTrippy wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    LiELF wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    jackjack_k wrote: »
    @Erpe wrote: »
    Erpe wrote: »
    @catloverplayer The Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile didn’t fail! Actually they were the first mobile Sims games that didn’t fail like the mobile versions of TS2, TS3 and the Sims Medieval all did - and exactly because TSF and TSM were online multiplayer games! ;)

    I don’t know if TS5 will fail or not because we don’t know anything about it yet (except that it has been in development since 2014 and almost certainly is multiplayer). Most likely it will be very different from the earlier big Sims games but still get packs and DLC.

    But I know that the small group of hardcore veteran simmers (maybe about a thousand?) in this forum are hard to convince because they just refuse the fact that they aren’t even in the target group for the big Sims games which instead are the millions of new young casual simmers who buy the huge majority of the games. (Therefore the gurus ignore this forum and use twitter instead.)

    Neither of those games are multiplayer, at least not in any way that would qualify a PC game as multiplayer. Both of those games are also free to install, and for the most part free to play.

    EA tried multiplayer with this game and it didn’t work out. I don’t know why you are basing your prediction for the sequel on mobile games, or a speculative “new group of casual simmers“. You don’t know who is installing those apps, or buying this game; for all you know there could be considerable overlap.
    EA tried rain and weather in the Sims 2 basegame. But it didn’t work out. The game became unstable and it was raining inside the houses. So EA just gave up and decided never to include weather in the Sims games, right?

    We all know that this wasn’t what happened. EA planned multiplayer for TS4 and for SimCity 2013. But when SimCity 2013 was released EA saw that multiplayer had been made in the wrong way and there wasn’t enough time to make it better in TS4. Therefore TS4 didn’t become a multiplayer game anyway. But EA then gave up and removed multiplayer from all its PC games? No, of course not! Instead EA began making TS5 and give it an improved multiplayer part that didn’t have the same problems.

    There are a huge number of ways to make multiplayer games and I don’t understand why it isn’t multiplayer when I am visiting cities belonging to my friends in the Sims Freeplay or let my sims become friends with sims that are owned by other simmers in any of the two mobile games??

    The two mobile games aren’t identical and in the Sims Mobile we can’t even visit cities belonging to other simmers as we can in Freeplay. TS5 will likely have multiplayer in a third way which I can’t guess yet. Maybe we can visit cities belonging to other simmers or maybe we can’t. Maybe we can invite sims belonging to other simmers like in the Sims Mobile. Maybe TS5 will be real-time too even though I doubt it. Maybe TS5 will require an Internet connection all the time or maybe it like so many multiplayer games can be played offline too. We just don’t know yet. But that EA should throw millions of dollars away by ignoring the huge minority of new young simmers just to please a few thousand older veteran simmers who want packs for TS4 in at least 20 more years isn’t within the real world no matter how hard you fight to convince me that EA care more about veteran simmers than about money ;):D

    There is no Sims 5. Please stop spreading information that there is. Until they confirm it, it’s not coming. Grant has already replied to people on Twitter than TS5 isn’t coming.
    Don’t lie! Grant has instead been very careful not to say anything about TS5 at all!

    The only time he ever has mentioned TS5 was when somebody asked him if the EPs he plans making are for TS5? Then he answered “No, they are for TS4.” But once more he just omitted the natural continuation which of course would have been ”..because TS5 won’t be released for a couple of years.” So don’t lie! Just because EA hasn’t yet told us which Sims games EA will release in the future this doesn’t mean that EA has said that they never ever will release a new Sims game again!
    And the majority of new Simmers have also disliked the idea of online. There have been several polls on various sites with people saying they don’t want an online game.
    Nevertheless EA released both the Sims Freeplay and the Sims Mobile anyway!

    There had also been several polls that showed that TS1 simmers didn’t want TS2 because they wanted more EPs for TS1 instead. But EA released TS2 anyway and I still remember how extremely angry almost all TS1 became.

    Then it became the Sims 2 simmers who hated the idea about TS3 and wanted many more EPs for TS2. But EA just released TS3 after 5 years anyway.

    Then it became the Sims 3 simmers who hated the idea about TS4 and many of them still refuse to play TS4 at all. But after 5 years EA released TS4 anyway.

    Now (for the fourth time) the current simmers (who now play TS4) hate the idea about TS5 and demand more EPs for TS4 instead. But for the fourth time they won’t be able to stop EA from announcing and releasing TS5 which likely again has been in development since 2014.

    The only thing that is new is that the Sims 4 simmers seem to have been able to make EA release more packs even after the release of TS5 which shows me that TS5 must be an online multiplayer game because such games usually have a much longer life than offline games have. (World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and still get new content now 14 years later.)

    So no! I don’t doubt that TS5 is about to be announced this summer. You may be right that most Sims 4 simmers won’t like it and won’t buy it very soon because EA seems to expect that too. But it will be the game for all the young new simmers who now only have the mobile Sims games to play.

    What I am most curious about is if EA really wants TS5 be based on subscriptions in a way similar to how World of Warcraft works? EA Access could be used for that. But exactly how EA will do it we just don’t know yet.

    Ask yourself why Grant so many times just has repeated that TS4 isn’t dead and still has a lot of planned content when he instead just could have said: “We are not ready to switch to Sims 5 for at least a couple more years. So don’t worry about TS4! It will still be our main Sims games for more years!” Why was it so important for him not to say that and to avoid mentioning TS5 at all??

    I think one of the problems here is that you keep reading Grant's quote in the wrong context. Maybe it's a language barrier, maybe it's just errant reading comprehension, but to clarify:

    A person on Twitter asked:
    "When you say a potential future pack, do you mean like for The Sims 5?"

    To which Grant replied:
    "No. Focused on Sims 4."

    I notice that when you repeat his answer, you put a comma between "no" and "focused", making his answer one sentence and assuming a deflected answer. This is incorrect. He first answered, "No." Period. As in, "No, I do NOT mean a potential future pack for Sims 5." Then he added, "Focused on Sims 4." As in, "Potential future pack ONLY for Sims 4." His sentence structure made his meaning perfectly clear. It has nothing to do with "wishful thinking" or interpretation.
    You are not remembering his tweets correctly and we can’t discuss this further without finding those tweets to see their exact wording. But he had to repeat many times that TS4 isn’t over and that he still plans to make a lot of more packs for TS4. In the end he even did something as unusual as to talk about packs “for years” even though EA never has done something like that before because EA usually doesn’t allow the devs to talk about unannouced packs at all!
    Also, I don't understand why you expect him to say anything that implies "Sims 5 in a few years" because that was not the question asked, nor has there been any implication whatsoever of even a hint to Sims 5 existing at all. If anything, his firm answer regarding development focus on Sims 4 for years to come, does more to imply that Sims 5 is nowhere near completion, if it's even being developed at all.
    I can’t explain that further without bringing maybe about 20 tweets where he again and again answered questions that were motivated by people’s curiosity about TS4’s future now where TS5 maybe could be announced.
    Furthermore, it doesn't seem to occur to you that your theory about EA "needing a new Sims game every five years because new young simmers can't buy all of the packs to a full game and they are the most important customers" might be completely wrong. Especially when all evidence currently points to the fact that Sims 4 is doing extremely well with sales and is, in fact, growing its player base and new Simmers are joining in on Sims 4 just fine. Which is why EA has decided to have the devs be more active on Twitter, (a social media network popular to younger generations), to engage the new generation of Simmers and to promote The Sims 4 and the new Seasons expansion. Remember, Seasons was only announced one month before its release date, which is very different from how EPs were handled before. So EA has decided on a new strategy to use twitter to market the expansions in a shorter time period. EA is also now interested in what these new Simmers want for Sims 4, so Grant, the lead producer, is taking polls and suggestions in order to continue full speed ahead with years more of development. Grant even stated it himself that they are indeed planning Sims 4 content for years to come. This is not "wishful thinking", this is actual factual statements from the lead producer himself.

    You ask why the devs have suddenly appeared on Twitter but you keep avoiding the most obvious answer: EA wants to continue to market Sims 4 to new Simmers because that's where the money is. Things are different for this era of The Sims. The game hasn't even reached its peak yet, but it is gaining momentum and more players join every day. There are brand new EA programs for Game Changers and there's Fan Kits now, and merchandise, and Sims 4 is more sensationalized than ever. This is Sims 4 in its heyday and there is no room for Sims 5 right now. It might be in development but it's very unlikely to be anywhere near ready to release. And if it were, It would only bring competition to its own profits, which is bad business. EA wouldn't risk releasing a competitor and dividing its own fanbase by making them choose which game to support. If you think parents have trouble buying their kids a Sims game with lots of extra packs, why in the world then, would they support two Sims games with lots of packs? By your own logic, the parents wouldn't support it. Especially if their young Simmer was already invested in the first game.

    There is more evidence against Sims 5 coming out anytime soon than there is to justify it's existence. It would be a bad business move by EA and they wouldn't compete with their own game in its prime, no matter how different the "new" model is. If anything, that is wishful thinking.
    It seems that I can’t convince people that EA just doesn’t want to lose millions of new simmers who would be forced to only play free mobile Sims games for years if EA didn’t release a new big PC Sims game for them.

    The interesting question is for me instead why EA released the Sims Mobile when EA already had the Sims Freeplay? People expected the Sims Mobile to replace Freeplay. But this doesn’t seem to be EA’s plan at all. Also the Sims Mobile is an extremely small and repetitive game where you only play 2-4 adult sims in one house and do almost the same quests over and over. So I actually doubt that simmers will play it for years like they have done with the Sims Freeplay. Therefore I now suspect EA to have planned the Sims Mobile mostly just as an introduction for the next big Sims game.

    Has it ever occured to you that you cannot convince anyone because you might just be...wrong?

    @LiELF honestly don't bother. I don't think this person even really cares about facts that don't support his vision.
    I am just not a dreaming simmer who (as simmers always have) just hope the the current basegame still will get more packs forever. It hasn’t ever become true and simmers have always become disappointed or angry when they have realized this (3 times now and soon for the fourth time too).
    Again though @Erpe
    Grant is almost always only active on Twitter before an EP releases. It's not out of the blue. It's actually been a convincing sign to many that an EP was coming.
    Also, many gurus became more active because the absence of a CM and a few layoffs made everyone very uncomfortable about the future of TS4. They came on to tell us that usually a CM would be interacting with us to avoid them sharing anything they're not allowed to but that they still wanted to soothe our fears.

    None of that is out of the blue.

    Don't tell @LiELF that she's the one not remembering the wording of a tweet correctly, when you fit tweets and facts into alternate timelines just so you can use them to tell us TS5 will be announced at E3. Oh oops, sorry, Gamescom now -_-
    The gurus went on twitter early in May 2018 at almost the same time as Kate became the new CM. But Seasons wasn’t announced until much later. Instead the gurus just again and again wrote that “TS4 isn’t over!”. They went on and on with this. Then Seasons was announced. But then they instead had to write again and again that Seasons wouldn’t become the last pack for TS4. Then they had to change that to “Seasons won’t be the last EP!” And then Grant had to strengthen that again by writing that he expect to make packs for years.

    The unusual thing here is that everybody suspected that TS5 soon would be announced and could be released next year. But instead the Gurus only talked about TS4 packs which people didn’t understand until they got Grant to answer that all those packs would be for TS4 and not for TS5. This stopped people because they didn’t have fantasy enough to imagine that TS4 still will get packs after the release of TS5. So they made it easy for the gurus to avoid questions about for how long time the announcement and release of TS5 will be delayed?

    Simmers are (as I have written) naive dreamers who prefer wishful thinking instead of asking about things that they fear could happen (such as TS5) ;)

    You're wrong, it was shortly before Kate was there, precisely because she wasn't there yet. Heck they even made a Forum post about it. Did you...read it?

    Anyway trust me I won't be getting into this with you today. No one's ever said it will last forever, just that it'll probably last longer than next year.
    Why don’t any of you just ask Grant on twitter? You only have to find the tweet where he says that he expect to make packs for TS4 for years and then answer: “Does this mean that TS5 won’t be released in the next couple of years?” But you are all so scared for his answer that you don’t dare to write that question. ;)

    I would likely have asked him that myself if I could do it here in the forum. But I am not using my twitter account for such things and am not curious enough to make a new twitter account just for that.
    @simgirl1010 I'm looking forward to it! I wonder what reasons we'll hear if it doesn't happen given his deep insight into "what EA thinks / believes / knows / says"
    I will just accept that the announcement of TS5 then was postponed more than I had expected. There could of course be reasons for EA to do that. But I am not a simmer who am too scared to even ask Grant about what he means. Just not interested enough ;)

    Scared?!?!

    Ah man you really have got to be kidding me.

    I'll look up the tweets for you, no biggie. When I'm on a PC. Even though I know it's pointless cause you'll be reading into it whatever you want or say they're just lying to everyone while secretly working on announcing TS5 at Gamescom. It's pointless because you could just look it up yourself. And the forum post. And everything else.

    But you won't. Why, I ponder, are you....
    scared?
  • EA_CianEA_Cian Posts: 1,359 EA Staff (retired)
    I'm putting the brakes on this discussion now as it's gone way off-the-tracks. Reminder to folks to please keep your conversations respectful and considerate of others. Thank you!
    ~my hair color is frequently changing, so my Sim reflects that~

    Have questions about necroposting? Check out our Necroposting thread.

    Bugs/Issues should be posted on Answers HQ, learn more over on Update on The Sims 4 Help Center.
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