“Well, you see, if we give away anything for free, it has to be your organs! Our law whor… I mean lawyers cannot afford to be some of the worst people on Earth unless we make things so expensive you have to sell all your organs on the black market!” ~ Them, probably
So it's a $10 tutorial? Don't care how expansive and cool it is, that's just fucked. The project scope should've been adjusted to make sure it would be free.
Exactly! What sort of logic are they even trying to apply there? Basically saying “We put a lot of time into our tech demo, and it came out better than expected, so we’re going to charge for it!”
That’s just crazy.
The whole principle is that the intro experience is supposed to be free. It exists to get people pumped about the cool new thing they just bought and excited to play with it.
I guess Nintendo decided that - since you already bought the console - they don’t especially care if you are pumped or not. They already got your money.
Makes sense, but if it’s only $10 it should just be free. $10 isn’t worth the bad PR and they should want this tour thing in as many hands as possible.
I think this money grab wouldn’t have gotten as much run in the media if it hadn’t been front and center in the Direct. Feels like a misstep, but then, so does €90 Mario Kart…
Last I heard they cancelled work on the next sims, doubled down on “improving the health” of The Sims 4 with improvements instead. Truly transformed into a GaaS, being 10+ years old.
To be fair, their predatory DLC model for Sims 4 means that their primary customer base has hundreds of dollars invested. Abandoning it at this point might piss a ton of them off. It’s also worth considering that a lot of their users aren’t normal gamers. They typically have basic devices that aren’t really geared towards gaming, so a newer game that’s more demanding might further alienate their base.
A million sales is a lot, but it’s nothing compared to over 85 million copies sold that Sims 4 has achieved.
It sold almost 470,000 copies on PC in its first week 11 years ago. The number of PC gamers has dramatically increased since then, so comparing launch numbers between now and then isn’t really an apt comparison.
If you can’t fathom why I compare a game’s total sales to its competing newcomer, maybe you’re missing the whole point of the specific comment thread I responded to. If you want more recent numbers for a better comparison , EA claims they sold an additional 15 million copies in 2024 alone.
The main point is, I do not think EA is sweating quite yet. They’re a shitty, massive corporation and I’m sure they’ll pump out a sequel if they determine the newcomer is actively taking large enough chunks of their player base.
Small correction - they said they *gained *15 million players, not that they *sold *15 million new copies - the Sims 4 base game is free to play. Also, there was some recent backlash around how Inzoi handles LGBTQ characters and EA seemingly capitalized on that by releasing a big LGBTQ update for free, months ahead of pride month. So, they might be sweating it a little. But, Sims is on a whole other level culturally than a lot of games, it’s got a lot of players that play only the Sims franchise, and it’s been doing well enough to keep a steady stream of DLC coming out for years now.
Not to mention it would be a buggy mess, geared towards on-line only content and predatory gacha mechanics. Remember that abortion that was the last SimCity ? It pretty much gave Cities: Skylines a permission to print money.
Which is really unfortunate because The Sims 4 was my least favorite of the franchise. Probably only played it for about 20 hours over the years while I have hundreds in 2 and 3.
It was my favorite for artstyle/graphics, but I was not pleased when I tried to stir up drama by kissing a Sim’s partner in the same room. That would have gotten the partner racing over to slap someone, an argument, and a Furious status in The Sims 2. In The Sims 4, they just didn’t notice, no consequences.
You can simply not use any of the AI features. The studio claims the genAI is a model trained solely on material their artists and devs created for this exact purpose and it runs locally, and as far as I know there is nothing in the game that uses genAI other than what the players can generate.
I still don’t feel good supporting it, personally. If everyone else is enjoying it, that’s cool, but I’ve got plenty of other games that don’t dip their toes into areas I’m not personally comfortable with. So for me it’s a non starter.
Maybe see what player counts look like in a few months before making great and grand plans? People want a fresh take on The Sims, but maybe without the backlog of a hundred DLCs and other EA shittery. But, inZOI may not be it. Apart from the pervasive and distasteful use of generative AI, it may just not have that special something.
So give it a while, lads. Maybe it really will be a hit, but sales in the first week mostly just say that people wanted a fresh swing at The Sims, not that they really want what inZOI is.
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Aktywne