There are very few series with the staying power of The Sims. Just as the original The Sims is at the cusp of its 25th anniversary, the most recent The Sims 4 has surpassed an equally impressive milestone: It’s 10 years old as of Sept. 2. The Sims 4 stands among very few other games that are just as popular — maybe even more so — a decade into their lifespan. The world, even, is so different now than it was 10 years ago. The Sims 4 is not without its technical problems, but it persists.
“We understand and know that we’re in a very unique space, and we have to actually pave that trail for other products and games to come,” The Sims franchise vice president Kate Gorman Revelli told Polygon.
So, why has Electronic Arts not yet abandoned The Sims 4 for something new? The answer is that it just makes sense. People have built up a decade’s worth of history in The Sims 4, be it generations of Sims families or hundreds of dollars’ worth of add-on content. Instead of wiping all that away with the next sequential game, Electronic Arts is building out new Sims experiences in parallel with each other: its mysterious Project Rene, a newly announced beta realm of sorts called The Sims Labs, and the continuing evolution and expansion of The Sims 4.
“So much of the way people play The Sims is about expressing themselves and their creativity and finding their own set of goals to pursue within the game, but what brings them back is their attachment to those little people that they’ve built,” Gorman Revelli said. “We also know that we’re not going to go to a linear model, because we have so much with The Sims 4. What we’re really looking at is, how do we continue to work with our community, work with our players, and not have you have this moment in time where you’re going to reset all your progress and lose those amazing memories, characters, and things that you’ve built within those 10 years of your gameplay, potentially?”
With The Sims 4 now 10 years old, Electronic Arts has outlined the future of the Sims franchise both within The Sims 4 and outside of it. The publisher posted a news release on Tuesday to its website to share what’s next: The Sims Labs, a small multiplayer Project Rene playtest, a recommitment to addressing The Sims 4’s “core game experience” and its technical issues, and a new way for The Sims’ custom content creators to get their work published officially in The Sims 4. Gorman Revelli spoke to Polygon on Monday to dig into Electronic Arts’ continued support of The Sims 4, and what these changes mean for the future of the brand.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Image: Maxis/Electronic Arts
Polygon: The Sims has been a franchise that’s sustained itself for 25 years. The Sims 4 has had this engaged community for 10 years now. Why are Electronic Arts and Maxis still supporting The Sims 4? It’s very rare for that to happen.
Kate Gorman Revelli: It’s incredibly rare. We understand and know that we’re in a very unique space, and we have to actually pave that trail for other products and games to come. We know our community is so important to us, and so while we continue to maintain what our players want, we still are trying to make a great experience for people coming into the franchise new as well. And so what you’re seeing is we’re working on all those parts of it. We have different parallel tracks at any given time.
We’re thinking about different players, their experience, their journey, and what they’re going to want in the game. We know we have an incredible amount of content, and we’ve built so many DLCs at this point in time that are live. You’re seeing even new experiences beyond DLCs that we’re integrating, like our login events. And fundamentally, what that means is that we’re just thinking about all the different ways our players are playing and how to continue to engage them. We know so much of the way people play The Sims is about expressing themselves and their creativity and finding their own set of goals to pursue within the game, but what brings them back is their attachment to those little people that they’ve built. And there’s so much emotional attachment, and you put so much of yourself into your gameplay.
Playing with life means that you’re really reflecting the world. You’re putting through actions and seeing what reactions come out, and you’re looking at all the different possibilities through this whimsical lens. And so life evolves, and I think the instinct to want to play with that life and experiment continues on. What that means for The Sims 4 is that we are fundamentally still at this place in time where our players have grown with us. We have so much that we’re offering. It’s a complex system that we’re working on. We also know that we’re not going to go to a linear model, because we have so much with The Sims 4. What we’re really looking at is, how do we continue to work with our community, work with our players, and not have you have this moment in time where you’re going to reset all your progress and lose those amazing memories, characters, and things that you’ve built within those 10 years of your gameplay, potentially?
It’s so unique to The Sims that you can have that gameplay continue for a decade. Ten years is so long to exist in a single save file. It’s sad to move on from it!
That’s not what we’re going to do. As a player with many generations of a save file, the last thing you want is all this new, great stuff, but you can’t access it. And so that’s our attitude around The Sims 4: It’s become such a part of so many people’s lives that we have to continue making it even better. There isn’t a need to go and start over completely, throw everything out, and bring you what’s supposedly better. Why is it better if you have to give up the things you love? And so we don’t want you to give up those experiences you’ve created in The Sims 4. We want to just keep adding to that.
That’s our franchise approach: Keeping The Sims 4 to be the place that you can play generational gameplay, you do in-depth building, you work with all your mods and CC. We want to continue to extend, so if you want to play that kind of multiplayer experience, that’ll be what you look for in the things we’ve talked about about Project Rene. There’s other things that we’re talking about in the works that will address other types of the ways people want to play, from different age groups, platforms, play styles, play length sessions. There are a lot of different ways people want to play with The Sims, and so we’re understanding that it’s not a one-size-fits-all. What you’re going to see is a lot of different types of experiences within our world and franchise that allow you to have that and fulfill those needs that you have, and fulfill the needs of your Sims in various ways, too.
Image: Maxis/Electronic Arts
Has the approach to development over — I was going to say 10 years, but I can say over the past 25 years, too — the decades evolved? I’m speaking to both the linear nature of games, but also in learning what the community wants. How has the team changed and adapted to meet the changing needs of the community?
At its core, we’re still developing things people love, and we still have that simulation experience that sets us apart. You know, nobody does life like we do, and we know that we have eight types of different generations within The Sims 4, and there’s just this breadth of gameplay that allows you to really recreate what you want and fulfill anything you can think of. As we think about that, we agree and understand that there is so much more to offer in the future. And so as platforms have evolved, as play patterns have evolved, we know that fundamentally, the user motivations or player motivations, and what core people want in their lives, continues to remain the same. As technology comes about, that need for having this coming-of-age experience at a certain time of your life, or having a relaxing experience as you get older with quicker sessions, is something that’s going to be here forever, no matter what the platforms or technology looks like at any given time.
We understand that there’s this ever-persistent need, and that’s really one of the things that’s made The Sims unique, is it’s something that every generation will want to play with, and we’ve seen now the impact of having so many people who grew up with The Sims, in their own worlds, and how they relate to those inherent experiences of learning about the world, learning about people through The Sims, and creating something they care about so much in this little space.
Understanding of this rite of passage to play The Sims is still there, and so we are continuing to evolve as our generations evolve too. We want to give people that experience that they had that was nostalgic, that they grew up with, while also providing a space to play in the ways that different generations are playing now, which is very online and very social, and not sacrificing either one of those and making the best experience possible for the people who are playing it. So that has definitely evolved, because we have more global players than ever, and that’s great, and people are playing games more than ever, and people are having fun and connecting socially through games more than they ever have. That will not continue to slow down. And so we have to continue to adapt and meet those needs while staying core to the true of what Sims fans know and love.
You mentioned the mods and CC as such a huge part of the Sims experience. How do Creator Kits add to what’s already there?
I’m so excited about our future around [user-generated content], mods, and CC. We understand and know that so much of what people love about The Sims is its flexibility and its endless possibilities. Our creators and our community have been a huge contributing factor to that. We want to make sure that as we go forward, we’re really thinking about that as a cohesive experience. We know today that the process of finding Creator Kits or finding CC online, to bring it into your game, is not exactly as smooth as it could be. This is the first step in a very comprehensive journey that we’re embarking on to really bring that experience for the players closer to what we know that they want and how they would like to play The Sims.
There are so many amazing creators, so we’re very excited about those first Creator Kits. It’s a process for us to learn how to make this more scalable in the future and make that process easier for more people to learn how to create within The Sims’ world, and be able to help those creators also find their space and let them have an audience within The Sims’ world.
Image: Maxis/Electronic Arts
I want to shift to talk about The Sims Labs a bit. What is it? It sounds like it might be similar to the Overwatch Public Test Region or something like that. How does Project Rene fit into that, too?
The way to think about The Sims Labs is, it’s going to be a lot of different types of experiences that are very specific or maybe are not the full game experience at any given time. So for example, Project Rene[’s playtest] will have some specific set of features that we’re testing at that time we’re developing that we’ll make available for playtesting within The Sims Labs. We also have other experiences, things that we’re looking into, like how the search works in the gallery might be an experience that we test through The Sims Labs, or experimenting with how we integrate different types of external features, like all sorts of really creative pieces.
Think about this as our way to help evolve with the community, because we know so much of that experience is impactful to how they play. It might be a new type of experience on a new platform, or it could be something like a new feature within The Sims 4. Or it could be an improvement. It’ll really be an umbrella for us getting our work side by side with our players in the environments they’re playing in, and seeing how they play to help really build on that space. We’re really just saying we want the community to be a part of this. We want to open the curtain to what we’ve been working on, even if it’s not fully baked and it’s not something that’s final. We’ve been doing that for a while, and so we want to take people with us and get their feedback and understand how they might use these pieces.
It’s a big umbrella. We’re working on a lot that we haven’t really even shared. The Sims Labs is the first time to even reveal that there’s so much more. Rene has been an umbrella for a lot of our experimental projects, and so now you can really think of the Labs as the umbrella for all of that. And so we don’t have to use Rene as much as a catch-all for everything that we’ve been working on.
What can you share about the Project Rene playtest that’s upcoming?
What we can tell you about Project Rene is we’re still very excited for the space that we’re working on. Again, it’s a complementary experience to all the things — it’s not a linear experience. There’s a lot we’ll be seeing in the playtest, but the core piece to know what Rene is we’re really looking at a way to make The Sims playable together. That’s what we’ll be continuing to iterate on and learn with the community.
Image: Maxis/Electronic Arts
In May, Electronic Arts announced a core team that’s working on the general experience and technical issues with The Sims 4. How’s that going?
It should all feel very cohesive in the sense that we are dedicated to continuing The Sims 4. We’ve said it many times, and this is really just another version of that. There are so many new ways that we are developing against it, whether that be those live events, which are fun, whether that be this dedicated pod. We know that the longevity of this very complex game is something that our community has been very vocal about, and we want to deliver the best-quality experiences. We’re dedicated to doing that.
Hopefully it’s clear from the way we’re working with the community and everything we’re announcing. We’ve been heads-down for a while working on all of these pieces, so it’s a great moment in time to give a preview. There’s still a lot of time before a lot of this comes to fruition, but we wanted to give a preview because it does feel like we’re entering a new era of The Sims. I want everyone who plays The Sims, has played The Sims, or might play The Sims in the future to know that this is an experience that is part of the core coming-of-age journey. It’s part of being a curious person in the world, to being yourself. It’s an incredibly valuable space for everyone, and it’s proven that over the last 25 years. We’re all very passionate and excited about our future, and we want to continue delivering those experiences to our players.
