The Sims is a truly magic video game series. Basically anyone who’s ever played it has got dozens of stories of weird and wonderful things that they’ve done over the years, whether that’s romancing the Grim Reaper or removing the pool ladder while a poor, unsuspecting Sim is taking a dip. Those two activities could be linked, now that I think about it.
The series’ most recent instalment, The Sims 4, has been out for almost nine years now, if you can believe it. In that time, it’s managed to garner over 70 million players, which is absolutely enormous - there’s no doubt that the game going permanently free-to-play last year will have helped there.
Take a look at this amazing recreation of the Dunder Mifflin office in The Sims 4 below.
As reported by Sims Community, it seems that EA may have accidentally revealed that the upcoming fifth Sims game (currently known as Project Rene) is going to be free-to-play, too. On the Maxis careers page, a listing was spotted for a new job role, titled ‘head of monetisation and marketplace for Project Rene’. This listing has since been removed from the website, but while it was live, fans spotted something pretty interesting in the job description.
One of the role responsibilities was reportedly to “own pricing of all content in this free-to-enter game, ensuring we have an optimal pricing and content architecture”, while another was to “own Project Rene’s in-game marketplace of content and [user-generated content] (free and paid), and manage a data-informed player-centric player purchase journey - maximising value to players, optimising player spend patterns, and minimising player churn”.
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So, if that’s all accurate, then it seems that it's currently planned that Project Rene will be free-to-start. It sounds like EA is planning on earning income via DLC instead, which is basically how The Sims 4 works now.
EA is yet to officially confirm this information, so we’ll have to watch this space.