Ultimate Guide: Life Sims Are In A Slump And The Only Way Out Is Becoming Strategy...

Even with new competition in the mix, the life sim genre feels so afraid of being difficult, but that's what made the original Sims games so great.

The life sim genre is in a slump. All the omens pointed to a life sim renaissance in 2025 that just didn't happen. Life By You got canned in 2024, Paralives is delayed until later this year, and Inzoi hasn't made quite the splash to revitalize the genre that I'd hoped for. Meanwhile The Sims 4 itself is still beset by save corruption bugs and Sims fans are left in the dark with leaks, rumors, and disappointment over what Project Rene is going to be. So many Sims players are terminally bored and I don't think we're ever truly going to be satisfied unless life sims get a lot harder again.

I grew up obsessively playing The Sims and The Sims 2. I am 'had a family computer in the living room' years old and have distinct memories of setting my radio alarm clock earlier than necessary so I could squeeze in a precious half hour of puppeting the fates of my sims between my bowl of cereal and walking to the bus stop.

I lapsed in my Sims playing for about a decade, missing The Sims 3 entirely on a detour through JRPG and Guild Wars obsessions as a teen, and came back to The Sims 4 as an adult to find that I wasn't particularly interested in Live Mode. I just wanted to build and decorate houses. "I've changed," I thought, perhaps even matured, into a gentle-hearted grownup who just likes designing a nice kitchen island instead of standing outside my crush's house and flirting with them on the sidewalk for six straight hours, ignoring imminent pants-wetting and starvation, until we can WooHoo.

I went back and tried The Sims 3 a few years ago and, to my surprise, I actually had a lot of fun messing around in Live Mode. I actively enjoyed my time as a love-obsessed car thief, a character arc I did not plan, and didn't feel at all that I was forcing myself to try the part of the series I'd been ignoring for so many years.

When EA re-released The Sims and The Sims 2 for the series' 25th anniversary last year, I was completely enamored with Live Mode again, this time in The Sims 2's unhinged drama. Sim can die unexpectedly if you make them do dumb things, unplanned romances can sizzle, and you can spend a whole night invested in pursuing a movie career for your dog.

It isn't me who's changed, then. It's life sims that have changed, and not for the better. One of the most common refrains I see from sims players online is as

Source: PC Gamer