Most games, when they launch, experience an initial rush of sales that quickly tapers off to a steady tricky over time. If you're a live service game, you're lucky if you can keep your returning and new player numbers steady long-term. But The Sims 4 is currently dealing with the exact opposite of that trend: ten years after launch, it just brought in over 15 million new players in a year.
This comes from EA's Q2 earnings, which released today. The 15 million figure is fairly shocking for a ten-year-old game, even given that the base game . For some perspective, it took The Sims 4 four years after launch to (this was back when it was a premium game).
When it first went free-to-play, it gained a whopping 31 million new players out of the gate, and reached a total of 85 million as of May 2024. It's not clear how exactly the 15 million gained lines up with the last count of 85 million to give us a new, current total, but that's still a heck of a lot of people. It helps that the game has improved significantly since its initial launch, which got a lukewarm reception for being rather thin on expected features at the time.
In our re-review of The Sims 4 this year, we noted that while it's starting to feel its age, "a strong community and frequent updates have kept it at the top of the life simulator genre." And indeed, a regular cadence of expansion packs and have helped it grow massively since its shift to free-to-play. Meanwhile, it seems there's no clear upcoming successor to re.
