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The Sims is dead. Long live The Sims. The death rattle began in September 2024, when publisher EA officially announced that The Sims 4 was to graduate into an ongoing, Fortnite-like platform. The same announcement revealed there would be no Sims 5 incoming, and that upcoming multiplayer venture Project Rene is set to exist alongside The Sims 4 instead. Whatever wariness I had for the end of the life sim's generational format can't compare with the truth of seeing the thing I love being taken out back and quietly put down.
The Sims 4's future is hanging over it like a guillotine, and in a selfish way, it's a distraction. I can't even enjoy its latest expansion – Royalty and Legacy, something I was so hyped for as a huge lover of The Sims Medieval – in good faith. How can I crown myself princess of the realm when the new microtransaction system cements The Sims 4 as just another live service game?
Not with a bang, but with a "glarch"
The Sims 4 Marketplace is my nemesis. I'm not here to slate battle passes and paid add-ons as a business strategy – what goes on between you and your credit card is none of my business, pal – but rather how and why these premium currencies put me off games as a 31 year-old.
Battle passes, seasonal content drops, and the "exclusivity" factors ascribed to them are there to feed our FOMO in this age of instant gratification, and unfortunately, it's proven to be a lucrative cash grab. Anyone can fall victim to such a siren song. Nickel-and-diming isn't exactly a new phenomenon in the world of gaming.
Premium in-game currencies and microtransactions have been around longer than battle passes, following a proud tradition of shoving quarters into arcade cabinets. And there I was thinking gaming had come such a long way since Pac-Man. Part of the reason you'd stump up the big bucks for something like those massive Neo Geo carts was to get away from the money hungry machines.
Alas, the beast has only transformed. Free-to-play games (FTP) with optional microtransactions, once heavily identified with mobile gaming, have now become the de-facto way to play online with pals across devices, with games like Fortnite being played by millions and the game itself having peaked at 44.7m players as of 2023.
EA took The Sims 4 free-to-play on Steam in 2022, and at the time, I shrugged it off. Despite its obvious positioning as a tempting ground, dangling exciting expansion packs in front of gamers on a budget, The Sims 4 is one of the best free Steam games as long as you can ignore the upselling that has been rampant ever since The Sims 4 adopted a more storefront-like splash page.
But now it's 2026, and The Sims 4 has just received its very own microtransaction system to boot.
Dag dag for now
I'm not going to be buying a handful of acne patch accessories for £5 just because.
If Royalty and Legacy really does turn out to be the 21st and final Sims 4 expansion pack, as the rumor mill claims, players will still be able to purchase in-game currency called Moolah using their real-life pennies and exchange it for new build or buy-mode items.
You can buy acne patches with Moolah. You can buy new t-shirts with Moolah. I used to download things like that for free from community modders back in 2007, or at least I would have if pimple patches as fashion choices had been a thing when I was 12. There's nothing about the Sims 4 Marketplace that serves me as someone who's been playing it since launch. I already have all the Sims expansion packs I want, and I'm not going to be buying a handful of acne patch accessories for £5 just because.
The end result is the unfortunate commodification of something that was once the life sim’s biggest strength: its creative community, and all the clever things it would come up with to enhance one another’s Simming experiences through the best Sims 4 mods.
It's confronted me with the fact that the free-to-play business model is precisely that: a money-making business model. In this case, one that caters to the younger end of the admittedly broad age spectrum of Sims 4 players, for whom microtransactions have always been a loud and proud norm in their games since they can remember.
If this is the future EA thinks we want for The Sims 4, it's certainly not the one I had in mind. Maybe it's time I return to The Sims 2 for good. At least it has pizza.
Explore some games like the Sims 4 if you're also on the hunt for your next life sim obsession.
