On InZOI and Paralives Competing With The Sims Project X

Statement: Just watched the Paralives trailer and ngl… they really should be worried about Project X if their whole strategy is just “better graphics” and “open neighborhoods” Meanwhile Paralives has a FULL open world, a bunch of genuinely interesting build mode innovations. Lowkey hoping Paralives scares EA enough to finally throw a bigger budget at Project X and make actually competitive features, because otherwise this thing is gonna flop HARD

The Sims Insider: I’ll answer this one first, but the short version is; EA don’t care about Sims 3 competitors.

The long version is; EA (and of course Maxis) know from their experience with The Sims 3 and their various prototypes of Sims games that have come up from time to time, that the Sims 3 set up of “one ongoing open world” is simply a recipe for disaster when it comes to game/stability.

While EA are obviously interested in specific aspects of inZoi and Paralives and adoptable features, EA doesn’t see these games as a threat, simply because they already know from experience with The Sims 3 that the game play set up pretty much has a 90% failure rate, with only a lucky few being able to play long term with no game or save breaking issues.

They already knew inZoi would have the players it does now, regardless of how good it is, they have fairly solid expectations the same will happen with Paralives. Because it is incredibly hard, and requires hundreds and hundreds of man hours to develop an open world life simulator to run indefinitely reliably.

It’s why The Sims 4 and Project X were never going to open the door to Open World concepts or ideas.

The more you fill in a single playable space at any given time, the more variables that open up. Limiting the variables makes it controllable, not limiting them makes them uncontrollable. On top of that, never allowing your game to reset is just asking for an eventual error or corruption issue.

People say “How come I have to have a loading screen just to visit my neighbour, the house is already loaded?” in regards to The Sims 4, but what people don’t realise is the entire world unloads and then reloads fresh, in order to keep things simple and manageable moving between venue types or families.

Same even with player built Apartments. There’s probably a very easy solution to make the Apartments in For Rent load without a full reload, but if a player continues to load between them for long periods of time without leaving the lot, you open the door to more potential issues that can unfold by not having any kind of hard reset.

In summary, EA have no interest and aren’t even afraid of publicly welcoming the competition when it comes to games like inZoi or Paralives, because they have no interest in being in competition with Sims 3 inspired games. They know the issues that will come from that set up.

I will say not a single person at Maxis or EA would be surprised the #1 reported issue with Paralives is save corruption or issues caused by longer/larger save files, because they predicted it before it went live. They know the audience will likely dwindle as casual players run into issues or lost save files, and walk away.

The only thing at this stage that would actually make EA nervous is a competitor that focuses on a Sims 4 or Project X ‘neighbourhood’ type approach (open or closed), because they know it suddenly becomes actual competition simply from having a set up that could actually hook casual audiences in long term. I’m sure me saying that publicly will cause a bad omen for them and one will actually arise 

I’m sure someone will say something like “but The Sims 4 has save corruption issues too!” but a very tiny percentage of players actually encounter it, and there’s a reason why you hear people refer to hearing about it, but not a lot of players actually reporting it’s happened to them. The fear outweighs the actual chance of it occurring. Players being able to have large and long term save files with an incredibly low risk of failure is something EA have no interest in moving away from, they contribute that long term player investment into the long term success of The Sims 4.

I believe EA was nervous about Grant Rodiek working on a Life Simulator as he had first hand knowledge on the direction from open world back to closed, and I’m sure their was a sigh of relief when the project was revealed to be nothing like The Sims. He has the knowledge to make a really good Sims 4 competitor.

New Sims 4 Kits Collaboration

Question: Hey legend do you know anything about another expansion pack coming this year re the above?

The Sims Insider: No Expansion Pack is in development as far as I’ve been told. Another collaboration Kit bundle is in the works if EA managed to secure the licenses.

I’d love to give a hint, but I’m clueless about what it could be, I’m sure it will be one for the books

On Marketing For The Sims 4 Fixes

Statement: Just wanna document this moment and point out how badly The Sims marketing team is handling this content drought… they’re literally posting reminders of things they did back in March, as if anyone’s been sitting there waiting for a recap

If this is the strategy until the end of the year, their main communication channels are gonna be absolutely dead

The Sims Insider: It’s not for nothing, there’s a direct correlation with players entering the game whenever bug reports are posted, even for ones fixed. It might seem pointless, especially for bugs that are non-issues but it does have a purpose that has a working track record.

The Sims 4 hasn’t seen any drops in the last 3 months, despite all the buzz around Paralives, EA are quite content right now and even somewhat surprised there wasn’t at least some drop. They even saw really good new player numbers with the Bridgerton collaboration news.

Defining The Sims 5 And The Sims Project X

The Sims Insider: EA have been very public that there will not be a Sims 5 (X may be called 5, but it will be name only). But a proper Sims 5 will likely never happen.

EA did extensive surveys and workshops in 2019 and early 2022, and it was unanimous that a Sims 5 was not going to fly. Majority of people aren’t Sims players, they’re Sims 4 players exclusively.

The reason why the latest EP wasn’t just a Royalty pack, but was instead a pack focused on Royalty and Legacies, is because EA know how deep players get into The Sims 4 and how a substantial amount play with legacies and long term families or multiple long term families. They also know players aren’t willing to give those up, so as X will be very much sharing the Sims 4 DNA they will find ways to incorporate the abilities to bring your families with you. This is such an important audience to EA, they know a Sims 5 where players will need to start a fresh save won’t appeal.

The same way there is no Minecraft 2. They know players are attached to what they’ve created and a brand new game creates a huge hurdle majority of players don’t want to jump. If EA could have their way, X wouldn’t exist and the Sims 4 would continue to be updated indefinitely. Unfortunately, the backlog is just too resource intensive to maintain and smaller fixes like Direct X upgrades were proving difficult to achieve any improvements. Project X is definitely reluctance and a gamble. But not a projected throw away flop that Sims 5 would be based on extensive market research.

Kit Bundles Until The Sims 4 Is Over

Question: As for the other question… People sourced this as EA looking to find employees to work on Sims 4 expansion pack

The Sims Insider: I believe EA were already forced to take down Job Ad’s that mentioned Project X (when they were hiring for Gen AI engineers) and as it’s not ruled out that Project X won’t continue the Sims 4 branding, I’m not sure if there’s any juice to this yet.

I haven’t spoken to many people since my trip has been my main focus, but I’ll ask around and see. But my understanding is Kit bundles are serving the Sims 4 into sunset.