Harvest Gamer - Harvest is Plentiful, Labourers Few

I've always been excited when there's a new Sims game to be released. Yes, including Sims Medieval. Sims is a staple in my computer. But I'm rather confused about EA's recent announcement to Project Rene, codename to the upcoming mainline Sims game. And despite the amount of content in Sims 4 - we still can't shake off the feeling of something lacking. Here are four things that I'm wary about The Sims 5: 1. Project Rene to support mobile and PC experience. I'm not sure how this will play out graphics and performance wise. We still have no information on whether mobile will translate to cloud servers or local files. But logging in to play Sims itself (not logging onto a launcher) is not what I'm excited to do. Having a third party launching the game serves as a gate to actually owning the game. What happens when it's time to move on to Sims 6? Until now, I enjoy Sims 2 because it runs without any launcher. Sims 5 may use local files to run on the PC -...

The joke of paying real cash to buy a virtual outfit, a virtual furniture, or a virtual lot to play Sims may become frighteningly real. A snippet from Maxis' career page caught the attention of many simmers when it involves Project Rene (aka Sims 5) looking for a Head of Marketplace & Monetization. The post describes that the newest entry to The Sims reveals a free-to-enter and paid content. It eludes to going away from the traditional buy-to-play model to a free-to-play model similar where players have to be connected online and subscribed to receive new content. The page above is no longer available on the Maxis Careers page (yet reflected on a LinkedIn post  too).  The Sims 4 base game became free-to-play last October 18, 2022. And EA / Maxis introduced Game packs and Kits for The Sims 4. So the likely move for Project Rene (Sims 5) would be to streamline the content distribution by offering a free base game and then building it up through a subscription model or throu...