Almost 100,000,000 people are playing The Sims 4 as EA adds option to snog Death

More than 15 million new players have joined The Sims 4 this year, as EA reconfirms that there’ll be no The Sims 5.

Earlier in the year, EA said that there was no plan to make The Sims 5 and instead they’d just continue to update The Sims 4, which was first released in 2014.

Some fans were surprised at this, especially since it was assumed that Project Rene – which is currently being tested – would eventually become a new sequel. But that’s not the case and now EA has given a very simple explanation for why: The Sims 4 is just too darn popular.

In their latest financial results, EA revealed that The Sims 4 has attracted more than 15 million new players in the last 12 months. That’s an extraordinary figure, that’s better than many games manage in their entire lifetime.

To put that figure in further context, it took The Sims 4 six years just to get to 20 million, although, as you’d expect, the numbers quickly started to shoot up when the game went free-to-play.

That essentially makes The Sims 4 a live service title, with the number of people playing it quadrupling since October 2022. There were 85 million players back in May, so EA will be looking at around 100 million by the end of this year.

This is all better than EA expected, as they insist that The Sims 4 will move ‘beyond linear, sequential Sims release.’ In other words, no The Sims 5 but some new spin-offs like Project Rene (assuming fan reaction to the playtest doesn’t get any worse).

While there’ll be no sequel there will be more expansions and more regular bug fixes. The next D:C, due to be released on Halloween, is called Life & Death and will expand the range of options if you have sims that are actually ghosts.

This will include the ability to make out with Death, which was previously just a bug but is now being introduced as a proper feature. (Did you know the original comic book motivation for Thanos is that he was trying to woo Marvel’s personification of Death? That’s why the original Avengers has that line about ‘courting death’, back before they’d worked out the rest of the plot.)

Those aren’t the only plans EA have for The Sims, as they also recently announced the return of the MySims brand on the Switch, which was originally created for the Wii.

This may be part of wider rumours of Nintendo encouraging more remasters for the Switch, while they work on the Switch 2, but it also suggests that The Sims in general is now a much higher priority for EA than it used to be – and that there’ll probably be more spin-offs as a result.