Life Sim Revolution Was Supposed To Happen This Year But It...
The great renaissance of the genre has been postponed—maybe indefinitely.
All signs pointed to 2025 being a banner year for Sims players. After decades with only one series to choose from for our dollhouse-core fantasies, two new competitors—Inzoi and Paralives—set launch dates for this year. Meanwhile The Sims 4 publicly buckled down on bug fixes for its DLC-crammed game.
But Inzoi didn't deliver the adrenaline shot I'd predicted and (still upcoming) Paralives has always been expected to be the smaller contender. Now, news about the future of The Sims series itself just keeps getting worse. The life sim revolution I'd predicted didn't turn up this year and now I'm worried it never will.
Eleven months ago I was optimistic. Even though we'd already gotten the bad news that there isn't going to be a Sims 5, things were looking swell for the rest of the series during its 25th anniversary in January. EA made some updates to The Sims 4 base game and re-released The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 in the Legacy Collection, making all four main games easily available on PC again for the first time in years. Heck, I fell in love with The Sims 2 again.
Meanwhile the release date for Inzoi had been set for March and it seemed like if anyone was going to successfully challenge The Sims series' dominance it would be this sleek and beautiful sim with all of Krafton's money behind it. But after an initial week or so of players digging into silly simulation quirks like stealing babies and catching sharks in rivers, it sunk in that Inzoi just didn't have much depth yet.
Inzoi is still in early access and Krafton is actively releasing game updates, new cities, and free DLCs, so it's not as though it's a failure. But Inzoi hasn't taken over the genre. It's not to life sims what Baldur's Gate 3 was to turn-based CRPGs, for instance. Inzoi didn't sink; it got becalmed, stuck out at sea without the wind to carry it anywhere.
The summer doldrums struck The Sims 4 too. There's been a steady plodding decline over the course of the year in the number of people searching for The Sims 4 and also in its concurrent players—on Steam at least. Overall interest in The Sims does cycle some every year, but this year it feels like I'm looking at widespread community exhaustion in graph form.
Now, to kick us while we're down, news of the EA buyout has struck, with players rightfully anxious that the values of the new owners will be hostile to the queer and inclusive series. There's been so much
Source: PC Gamer
