Rachel Franklin is to the Sims what Mikhail Gorbachev was to the Soviet Union.

It saddens me that they outright admit to using telemetry to essentially strip the game into the bare minimum that the majority of players ask for. Approaching a game from that standpoint kills invention and creativity.

The agenda they push today completely ignores the fact that The Sims itself was an experiment to begin with; that the original game was greenlit at all is a miracle. I'm sure they had to fight to get Makin' Magic funded, and that off-the-wall expansion was a fan favorite. I have to agree with what many of you are saying: The Sims is marketed to be as easily digestible as possible, and that's going to kill it. We've replaced fun with focus groups. I feel like the current culture of The Sims Studio wouldn't even approve making an expansion as unusual as Into The Future.

I'm so glad Colossal Order produced Cities: Skylines. I was truly worried SimCity 2013 was the foreseeable end of the genre, but watching Simtropolis spring back to life with the release of C:S made me very happy. Let's hope a new company will take up the mantle, if only so I don't see great communities like this one wither away.

No..that's the wrong guy-Try Stalin, and you have the comparison.

Stalin might be a tad harsh; it's not like Rachel's personally responsible for the deaths of millions... yet.

Maybe not millions, but certainly thousands of Sims, through death-by-emotions...


There is no place for "snack-sized gaming". Gaming is a religion, and these "mobile game" designers are false prophets. If you're only playing for a few minutes per session (as you can't play longer because the game smacks you with timers), what are you supposed to do during the hours in between?

Also, I'm now convinced VentureBeat is a hate speech site, as they glorify these mobile game false prophets with articles like these.

In this forum alone, comparisons of burgers to the games in question shown quality and quantity of the product's content. My personal favorite shown TS3 as a quality burger with soda and fries as the expansion and stuff pack with TS4 and the add ons as parts of a burger.

Still, I have to stand my ground on this issue that TS4 is a failure for not carrying over what made TS3 one of the best entries in the PC series alone.

I like how she sits there and can confidently say the fans are wrong and they did everything right. You can look at EA's end of year reports to investors. The Sims 4 is bombing. It doesn't have specific numbers, but it lists The Sims 4 as bringing down their projected quarterly revenue. It loses them money every quarter. I can't imagine they will be allowed to continue this much longer, but it's hard to say with a franchise like this. It's big, so it'd be hard to just shut it down mid life cycle and admit defeat. However Nintendo is discontinuing the WiiU and launching a new replacement next year so anything is possible.

Quite the opposite actually, they said "Last year's Q2 gross margin was exceptionally strong, due to The Sims 4." (Oct 29, 2015), "In the first quarter, EA Sports FIFA 15, Battlefield Hardline, and The Sims 4 drove solid revenue and delivered excellent margins" (Jul 30, 2015), "the continued success of The Sims 4, which delivers very high margins by virtue of being a PC title based on wholly-owned IP" (Jul 30, 2015), " strong sales of Battlefield Hardline, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and the Sims 4" (May 5, 2015)

Could you provide some links? Someone here recently painted a very different scenario, so seeing actual numbers would be helpful.

well if you are trying to accommodate the different ways we play Rachel then you should actually listen.

we always have Ts3 and Ts2