Good article; the Sims is not what it used to be and neither the franchise nor its fans have been treated with respect. While the article covers a lot of major issues, three things to add that weren't covered or not covered adequately:
1. Origin is also a factor. Once it came out, you needed Origin to download new stuff for the Sims--if you wanted stuff from the Store anyway. Some folks didn't want Origin, and when it first come out, its integration was clunky and--surprise surprise--caused crashes.
2. It's not the Rabbit Holes themselves, it's how they implemented them, and the potential content REMOVED because of them. If the Rabbit Holes ONLY did what you covered -- provided buildings for Sims to disappear into while they worked -- they'd be fine because they would then, indeed, be an improvement over the previous games' implementation of Sim work. BUT the Rabbit Holes ALSO replaced Sim restaurants and businesses--in previous games, you could walk into and run shops and restaurants. The Sims 3 Rabbit Holes not only represent workplaces, but also represent grocery stores, bookstores, restaurants, spas, and other buildings that in the Sims 1 and Sims 2 you could build and go inside and experience. While the World Adventures, Ambitions, and Nightlife expansions added some go-inside, fully buildable venues to a degree, never actually to the complexity or degree of previous games -- to this day, to my knowledge, you can still not build (Sims 1: Hot Date, Sims 2 Core) or have a Sim run (Sims 2: Open For Business) a proper restaurant. And it is harder to build businesses, and you cannot have playable Sims run them (something that became an expectation after the wildly popular and successful Open For Business expansion in the Sims 2). So Simmers were disappointed because the Rabbit Holes did not add content--or what they did add was very little--but that they in fact took away content that to this day has never been fully re-added, not even in expansions.
3. The issue with the "Katy Perry Expansion" wasn't the Katy Perry bits --- it was that the Sims 3 Showtime was 1/3 a repeat of Sims 3 Nightlife but this time with singers instead of bands, and 1/3 a Facebook app, and 1/3 a "social function" called SimPort which requires people to play online and hope they get people to play with them and can only unlock certain content if you use. With all the ideas for expansions that one could implement, this was sorely disappointing to say the least.
I loved all of the Sims games and I love the many innovations in the Sims 3 -- the seamless neighborhood is amazing, I love the story mode (even if that feature is very controversial amongst fans), I love the Create a Style, I LOVED the dungeon crawling and adventuring mechanic in the 1st expansion -- but even I don't buy Sims products any more. I stopped after Nightlife, which was a bit lackluster, and moreover, after I purchased items in the Sims Store which failed to properly download and install on my machine, and EA Customer Service's response was basically, in so many words, "Sucks to be you." I also didn't want to deal with Origin. I keep a close eye on it, always hoping to see if a new expansion will be released that will feel worth buying or to see if finally, finally, the game breaking bugs in the first expansion, World Adventures, will actually be fixed. But I don't expect anything -- if I never buy anything Sims again, it will not come as a surprise to me.
The thing is, since Sims is more and more churning out disgruntled customers -- it's a ripe stage for an indie developer to come up with their own take on any or all of a modern life simulator, storytelling engine, or machinima creation toolset. Even if the dissatisfied Simmers are a few thousand or million out of the many more millions of suckers who still pay for incomplete, buggy, nickel-and-diming software and thank EA for it, that few thousand or million folks would be more than enough to support a dedicated younger developer and the projects they have to come.
