The Sims 4 is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox One.There are a lot of extras players can buy for The Sims 4: Expansion Packs, Game Packs, and Stuff Packs give players plenty of extra content to choose from. Most of these have since been added to the game in free updates, but as recently as Growing Together, Simmers have been vocal that a lot of the paid content should have been a part of The Sims to begin with, and many players in the community are worried about the replacement of Stuff Packs with Kits, claiming it's a step backward rather than towards solving the problems the community has about feeling like they're paying double for the same content. The base game is essentially a free trial of the real experience of The Sims 4, a problem that's persisted since its very shaky launch in 2014 that excluded a lot of the gameplay and items that have been an essential part of The Sims franchise for decades such as pools, terrain tools, basements, toddlers, and even more complicated mechanics such as a memory system. While the base game of The Sims 4 has been free for some years now, much of the very basic gameplay mechanics that make it worth playing are locked behind hundreds of dollars of Expansions, Game Packs, Stuff Packs, and now Kits, making this a confusing landscape for new players who don't know what they need to create the experience they want when playing the game. The recent Infant update that came with The Sims 4: Growing Together is an example of this, where the new Infant life stage was given to all players as a part of a free update, but essential Infant gameplay such as changing tables and Infant milestones were only available after purchasing Growing Togetherwhich released two days after the Infant update.Īztecross notes the difference between a Free Trial and Free to Play, and it's an observation that's relevant regarding The Sims 4's strategy towards content add-ons. There's no "pay to win" mechanic in The Sims 4, but to get any enjoyment from playing The Sims 4 and to get access to the vast majority of the content that makes the game playable beyond a dozen hours, buying much of the add-on content is necessary.Īnother issue is that gating content behind a paywall and timing releases with free updates, so said gating feels worse for players who don't buy the new content, is a particularly egregious practice. The total cost of all the add-on content in The Sims 4 is over $1,050. Often, there's barely enough content in a Kit to sufficiently furnish a single room.įor a game that's a single-player experience, The Sims 4 is already prohibitively expensive if the player wants to invest in all the content. $5 seems like a small amount, but Kits are released with far more regularity than any other content pack, often have little to no gameplay, and are often just cosmetic additions or, as previously mentioned, suspected to be leftover content from Expansion packs that's now being monetized. Instead, The Sims developer has shifted its focus to releasing Kits, which are small bundles of content that each cost $5 and contain 15–25 build or CAS items. In January 2021, the Paranormal Stuff Pack was released and, despite the overwhelmingly positive reception for it, it was the last Stuff Pack to be released as of June 2023. This wasn't the last time this would happen, with Stuff Packs and Kit announcements following Expansion releases with content that suspiciously followed the same theme as the expansion that had just been released, examples of which include The Sims 4: Cottage Living and the Country Kitchen Kit which followed soon after. Essentially, players had to pay extra for content that, in the past, had been included in one expansion pack. Just a few months later, The Sims 4: My First Pet Stuff was released, with the content many Simmers argued had been missing from the Cats & Dogs pack, including new outfits for the cats and dogs and small pets that had been excluded from the original pack.
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