General The Sims 4 Marketplace Morale within Sims Studio

Sims Insider: I had to pretend I wasn’t 100% sure this was coming and that it was from different sources or what have you, but sadly this has been talked a lot about amongst employees for several months and morale is very low at the moment at EA. They’re basically treating Maxis employees like their own creators instead of a development studio. Very sad to see.

EA have been working on this for months and specifically told people they needed to design it in a way that almost always left virtual currency in your bank.

Maxis employees are hoping this storefront fails so that EA gives up on this idea. They plan on exploring the idea of scalable pricing for content you’d see. So a pack with more gameplay items or animations would potentially cost more than another pack that has less.

One World and Paid Expansions of Project X Neighborhoods

They’re also exploring the idea of having one world for Project X over seperate releases, and having you start with a smaller chunk that you have to pay for to expand as time goes on. So you might start with two Neighbourhoods and then have to pay to unlock new Neighbourhoods as they come out. Rather than delivering one world at a time with different packs.

They’ve absolutely found every idea they can to squeeze money out of the Sims and save money on development by basically remaking the same game again with some shiny perks but cutting off a lot of the back catalogue that eats into QA time.

Project X Questions and Answers

Question: So from what I get, they’re planning to roll this Marketplace out across the whole franchise eventually, right? Like for other Sims stuff too? Including Project X?

Also, do you happen to know anything about where X is at right now? Are they still aiming for a late 2026 release or is that up in the air?

Sims Insider: I don’t know about when X is launching. I think that is up in the air at this stage.

The last I heard was they were looking to visual styles and anti-piracy measures. I’m assuming the Marketplace will stop people from being able to pirate things outside assets and I believe the game will have an always online requirement, pirated copies won’t work. But to be confirmed.

Question: It’s funny you said they’re basically remaking the same game because the recently announced Quality of Life roadmap is also said to be a cost-cutting investment; fixing the current product will allow them to bring more of it for Project X. Do you happen to know anything else about this?

Sims Insider: I know that Project X is a cost cutting project to keep a mainline Sims game as part of its live service model, and this is the easiest way to continue that live service model. They’re just shifting the product to a new product and in process, cutting a huge chunk of their QA work for older content.

They are basically going to be recycling everything they can from The Sims 4 and doing the bare minimum to make it attractive enough to be considered a new game to invest in. Certain things like increasing visual fidelity, or changing how the game works (eg. open neighbourhoods vs closed neighbourhoods) will have very little change in cost to EA for the most part as an ongoing cost for dlc development. This is definitely not a Sims 5, it’s more of a Sims 4 refresh being sold separately and not being compatible with majority of previous content, as I assume EA will recycle Sims 4 DLC content as well.

I would imagine a lot of the things EA will be focusing on is bugs or tuning things that will be used for Project X and will score some brownie points if they can retrospectively improve the Sims 4.