SimGuruTrev took some time to talk with The Sims community members on The Sims Reddit. One of the very long responses he wrote was about the community feedback and how The Sims Team is taking implementing Toddlers very seriously, meaning that they don’t want to rush something out the door just because everyone wants it.
Down below you’ll find his full response on this topic:
We do listen. We hear you, we listen and, more importantly, we take note of what the community is telling us. It’s tough for us because if we could give everyone what they want we’d do it. In a heartbeat. It’s not like we sit there going “They want X but who care, let’s give them Y instead.”
We release things in packs and we like those packs to have a theme. When we get a lot of little suggestions, it’s hard to find the right place for them. But, we have boat loads of little puzzle pieces of ideas that we’ve gathered from the community and from the development team. When we’re brainstorming ideas for a new pack, we’ll dig through our little puzzle pieces and see if any of them fit with our current idea. And hell, sometimes we’ll try and jam those pieces in even if they don’t quite fit (for instance, Aliens coming with Seasons in Sims 3). But, by and large, we want it to feel like one cohesive pack and not just a bunch of odds and ends stuck together.
On the flip-side of that, when people give us broad ideas, like “I’d like more family gameplay” or “we want toddlers”, we want to make sure we fill in all the those missing puzzle pieces in a way that everyone will enjoy. If we polled 100 different people about what they’d like to see with regard to toddlers, for example, we’d get 100 different answers. So we certainly don’t want to rush something out the door just because everyone wants it. If we tried to rush some sort of family pack out the door it might only satisfy 5% of the people that wanted more family gameplay. So we like to take our time with it. We have a lot of discussions about what it actually means to play with family, or what it meansto have a toddler. What new objects do we need? What interactions and socials would you have? Would there be new skills? Would there be any new careers? What sort of CAS parts and clothing do we want to add? These are the questions we ask ourselves about every feature. We don’t like to add a big feature to the game just for the sake of adding it. We want to take our time, make sure we do it right. And if we don’t think we can, then we hold off until we feel like we can.
So, long story short, we hear you. We listen to every idea we see. When it’s an idea we can get behind, or something everyone clearly wants, we write it down. It does not go unnoticed! We really do care about our community. Most people don’t realize it but these SimGuru accounts aren’t required. Random people on the team want to reach out to the community, so they make a SimGuru name. We’re never told what to say. We genuinely care about the experience our players have with the game. It matters to us. A lot.
