EA: "If The Sims 4 Isn't Successful, There Won't be a Sims 5"

[oldtaku]

This is just a natural part of EA's cycle of destroying beloved franchises for business and marketing reasons.

It's about time it died and left a vacuum for someone else anyhow. And the once amazing and proud, now sad and technically inept liars, Maxis, can go down with it.

 

[Micah Weil]

It appears that EA is no longer satisfied with shooting itself in the foot with conventional weaponry and has upgraded to artillery...

 

[ObserverStatus]

So is this their master plan?
Step 1: Cut corners with the Sims 4 and save some money. (smaller world, no pools and toddlers, bugs, etc.)
Step 2: Threaten fanbase by not developing the next Sims game if Sims 4 is not successful.
Step 3: Make
oads of money.
Step 4: Repeat.
Sounds like that turning over a new leaf thing isn't working so well right now.

Funny, you'd think they would have learned that this wouldn't work after Dead Space 3.

 

[Final7111]

The Sims 4 sucks, and just like Simcity isn't selling well. However people love these games, so the best way to sell them is to threaten not to make another. EA is truely the worst video game company out there!

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Oh EA, you so silly!

First you say you don't want to be considered the worst company in America again [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/137287-EA-We-Never-Want-to-Be-Named-Worst-U-S-Company-Again-Be-Named-Worst-U-S-Company-Again] and then you state that if your rush-job piece of S game doesn't sell well, you're going to kill the entire franchise.

But yeah EA, threaten your consumer base. That's the key to not being voted the worst company in America...

No no, the statement itself is reasonable enough. After all if the franchise is no longer profitable, why should they continue it? The problem is they didn't exactly take the steps necessary to ensure that The Sims 4 would be successful and instead banked everything on name recognition.

 

[kajinking]

I like how everyone is forgetting how bug-ridden and bloated (a ram hog, I have a computer with 16gb of ram, and with all the xp and DLC and mods, the game slows down) sims 3 was, and damn, the LOADING TIMES! damn, they were bad.

While thats true, it was the result of trying something to drastically improve the franchise - which it did. Even if you fix the current bugs in The Sims 4, you've got less than The Sims 2 did at release, with the only exception being character creation. The Sims 4 is a blatant downgrade for the series, an insult to a long-time fan like myself. No Create a Style, no Open World, no ability to create new lots, no ability to alter the world or public lots, alongside the game being 32-bit only. This is easily the weakest iteration since the first Sims game, and the engine prevents the game from being improved. While the Sims 3 had, quite frankly, atrocious loading times, everything was loaded once the game did so, and it was improved further into the game's lifecycle. That hope doesn't exist for many of the core features that are either missing or crippled in TS4.

A very good point, there is a reason I finally switched to the sims 3 once weather was finally added back in (honestly I abandoned the idea of getting the Sims 4 once they tried to pull that stunt again) and that reason is that once you get the content with expansions evened out the Sims 3 at its base did actually add things over the Sims 2 base game. I'll admit I was skeptical of the open neighborhood at first but eventually I grew to like it along with the whole story progression town aspect and I even used the create a style tool far more than I thought I would.

In the end the Sims 3 might not have been the best Sims Game ever made but it did do things diffrently and give you a reason to at least try it. What does the Sims 4 give? What makes people buy the game and try it instead of booting up their old copy of 3,2, or even 1? Yes they added in a few new features but when it comes at the cost of so many others how does it hope to balance out?

I'm so frustrated over the whole thing it's like Simcity 2013 all over again, you know someone could make a great game with the IP and some of the mechanics show so much promise (education leading to high tech factories,city specialization) yet it falls flat and seems half done like someone just wanted it out the door and making money as fast as possible.

 

[Haakmed]

So let me get this straight, you don't want to be the worst company in America again so you release a game with tons of features cut from it with every intention of selling them later as DLC. And if you don't sell enough of that game and its DLC to hit some target which I can only assume is astronomically high because you figure that your market for Sims grows with each release, and you tell those people that features are cut and then threaten future games development if they don't buy the new one.

So how exactly are you trying to make your public image better again? Are you curing cancer? Opening new studios to try and make new IPs with new ideas? Or are you just gonna keep shoveling the same crap and let others take the risk and just clone those?

This will only end well.

 

[FalloutJack]

I wonder why Atlus never has these problems. OH WAIT, they make GOOD GAMES.

"Hee ho!"​

 

[Naqel]

EA is a bunch of greedy idiots, but this might be the first time their stupidity gets in the way of their greed.

No Sims 5? That's basically like saying that they want there to be a void in the market in 5 years, that someone else gets to fill in their absence.

 

[The Feast]

Well, Maxis, or whoever created the Sims games, EA would like to say bye-bye for all the work you've done. Now, get out of here. There are probably some long lived franchise that EA want to destroy.

 

[Burchy22]

I find it weird that people are saying EA is being hypocritical when it was two different people that said it.
I actually feel sorry for the CEO Andrew Wilson, he say's one day that he doesn't want to be the worst anymore then the very next day someone else in EA runs out into the spotlight and yells "Fuck you, gamers!" and now Wilson is all like "Dude, what the hell?! I just said we aren't doing that anymore!"

 

[xmbts]

Oh no, there won't be a game after the game that isn't out yet?

I find it funny that they say they're dedicated to making 4 as good a game as possible and not just moving on to a sequel while simultaneously factoring the sequel into things. And that's not even touching the fact that 3 will still be the better game.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Maybe it'll actually be successful if you didn't take stuff away, EA. Make a BETTER sequel.

 

[Do4600]

Good, hope it isn't successful you collective of awful halfwits.

The only entertainment I want out of EA anymore is the pleasure of watching it slowly go bankrupt. I'm really not a mean person usually so I'm a bit astounded at how much empathy I feel towards ancient Persian kings taking glee in watching an execution. I'm really excited for EA to go bankrupt, I really hope I get to see it, I have an evil hatred for EA that would only be justified if they killed several of my dogs.

Everything they do is wrong, for the past six years their strategy has been to make a product and then scientifically tweak the amount of annoyance in the game so that's it's just barely tolerable. They define their own failures as when they go just past that line, like Dungeon Keeper mobile, if they could do that again they would just barely tone down the paid transactions, just enough to make it playable but not enough for you to actually have real fun.

It's as if all the rights for producing chocolate bars were obtained by a single company and this company started adding fine sawdust to the bars. Every year they would try to add more sawdust to each batch, some batches even began to look like crumbly brown particle board. People complained, they said: "If making chocolate bars is so expensive that you have to add sawdust to make the required quantity, we would much prefer you increase the price and remove the sawdust." The company responded by decreasing the size of the bars and adding a complex and expensive brown dye. The chocolate simply isn't worth eating anymore, I'd rather wait for the company to go out of business and see what happens when other people are allowed to make chocolate bars again. They've ruined it for me.

 

[nevarran]

Aaaand EA's plans to "not win the price for worst company" came to a sudden halt

 

[gigastar]

Oh dont worry i suspect there will be many microtransaction-laden iOS ports to make.

This is gonna bite them in the ass in the future. Once their license of the sims expires someone is gonna take it and have the sims million dollar fanbase and ea will cry because they lost all that money.

I could be wrong, but last i checked it takes 70 years for IP rights to expire.

And it can be refreshed by publishing literally anything related to the franchise.

I read it differently. To me it wasn't the same as Frank Gibeau the executive saying "5 mil or gtfo." This is the developer saying "We have to make this good so that you'll buy it. Otherwise they won't ask us to make another one."

This would be a valid statement, if Maxis were not conclusively proven to be emitting bullshit after SimCity blew up in thier faces.

 

[immortalfrieza]

This is gonna bite them in the ass in the future. Once their license of the sims expires someone is gonna take it and have the sims million dollar fanbase and ea will cry because they lost all that money.

And of course, EA will make sure that it takes at least a century if not longer before the license for Sims runs out, just to spite the content creators and customers that didn't take it in the ass from them. The same thing is happening with Capcom and Megaman.

OT: EA... EA... EA...

You get the worst company in America "award" so often even over companies that do horrible things that are in the grand scheme a lot more important not just because you royally screw over your customers constantly in every way you think you can get away with, but because you do that as blatantly and obviously as possible while flipping off your customers the entire time. My suggestion is you REALLY need to fire your marketing department, all of it, and have everybody else shut up forever, not a word. When you can improve your image just by not saying anything you KNOW you've being doing it wrong.

 

[-Dragmire-]

???

Of course they're not working on Sims 5, they have a couple years of expansions to get out of the way first.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Is this their way of scaring us into buying The Sims 4? Because that's not gonna happen. I don't give a shit if there is never a another Sims game if their strategy for selling it is to cut it into smallest of pieces to be sold as DLC.

 

[Fasckira]

Thing is, Grant Rodiek calls it like it is. Read through all his posts - his biggest crime is that he doesn't mince words, so fair play to him I say.

Sims 4 is seriously unlikely to fail. Yeah, the majority of gamer sites feature complaints about all the many wrongdoings but for every complaint theres a vast majority more happily willing to buy the Sims 4 "because Sims".

I dont think Grant was trying to threaten anyone in his post, just speaking in the harsh terms of the business world - if Sims 4 somehow didn't turn a tidy profit then it'd likely be dropped considering EA's financial results for the past few years. In this instance, its being played safe to review the results at least a few weeks into the go-live.

He also does say this in response:

It's not all or nothing, per se, but something has to pay for 5.

Source: http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/comment/12589864/#Comment_12589864