A decade of The Sims

CB Droege 4 Feb, 2010 at 11:51am ET Article published in Gaming

The Sims, a game which would eventually spawn one of the most prolific franchises in gaming history, was released on 4 February, 2000: ten years ago today. Since that day, The Sims has pulled in $2.5 billion and sold 100 million boxes across many sequels and expansions, making it the 4th best-selling video game franchise behind Mario, Pokémon and Tetris, all of which are older and have many more titles under their banner.

The Sims is a series of “life simulation” games originally created under Maxis’ long-standing “Sim” umbrella, which contained franchises like SimAnt, SimEarth, SimLife and–The Sims‘ direct parent franchise–SimCity. In The Sims, players are tasked with building a neighborhood for their characters, called Sims, which must then be filled with furniture and appliances to make the Sims happy.

In order to get the money to buy all these things, the Sims must get and keep jobs, all while occupying their free time with socialization, meditation, hygiene and romance, with different Sims needing different amounts of each to stay balanced. Each major release has introduced a new engine, with better graphics and new options for the Sims behaviors. For example, sex, births, aging and death were not introduced until The Sims 2 (characters in The Sims characters were ageless and immortal).

The Sims has been so successful largely because of its wide appeal as a very accessible and intuitive game. It was one of the first experiments in crafting games for people who don’t self-identify as gamers. The open-ended, sandboxy mechanics of The Sims appeals to the human instinct to craft narratives and control the environment around them, without being too challenging for non-gamers, as there is no goal beyond the player’s own desires for their Sims. This accessibility, combined with the tendency to release many themed expansion packs (each containing new furniture, locales or behavior options), is responsible for the vast number of units sold.

Since its June 2009 launch, The Sims 3 has sold more than 4.5 million units worldwide and stands as the #1 best-selling PC title for 2009 in North America and Europe. The Sims 3 app for the iPhone and iPod touch also became the top selling game on Apple’s App Store for 2009 and became the #1 paid app in nearly 40 countries worldwide.

Comments

4 Feb 2010 ~ 12:18pm Thrax I have long held the opinion that a game which relies on such frequent expansions to maintain relevancy is a game built around a fundamentally flawed design.

There are many games that are spoken of in tones of reverence and are often replayed, and they have never once been so much as updated or expanded upon since their inception. Early console games come to mind, but there are many PC titles which follow that course. Deus Ex comes immediately to mind.

Nevertheless, while The Sims has undoubtedly done well, I contend that it succeeds on the backs of the undiscerning, rather than on quality.
4 Feb 2010 ~ 1:38pm BuddyJ If the quality wasn't there, the chances of any success at all are slim. The Sims success stems from embracing consumerism on all levels. It's the first franchise to capitalize on the idea that people like to buy crap.

"Lets make a game about buying crap," someone said. "We'll sell some crap with some crap so you can have crap in your crap!"

Profits ensued.
4 Feb 2010 ~ 2:07pm chrisWhite While it may be flawed conceptually and I've never understood the appeal of it, it's hard to argue that it hasn't been a pretty huge success commercially. Perhaps it's not flawed, just targeted to a completely different audience then most of us?
4 Feb 2010 ~ 2:21pm CB I enjoyed the game when I tried it. I haven't played since the first one, but I remember having only one real complaint, and that was that my characters didn't have enough real freetime because the weekends were only one day long, and I could never manage to get in all the socializing that they needed in just one day.
4 Feb 2010 ~ 8:01pm chrisWhite Have you guys all checked out the crazy interesting blog about the social/gaming experiment of two homeless Sims someone created?
5 Feb 2010 ~ 10:50am Cris It is not only the expansions but also the moddabilty what makes the Sims a replayable game, my wife spends several hours a day looking for downloadable stuff on the net (new furniture, walls, decoration, roofs, floors...). Not paid stuff but stuff designed by gamers who post them in forums, blogs, etc.

She doesn't really give a flip about all the expansions and the only reason why she has them is because some of the modded stuff relies on these expansions (ie: a modded object was created from another object that comes in an expansion), otherwise she would still play with the vanilla game.
6 Feb 2010 ~ 6:51pm patrickcabenjamin I think that the reason it was so successful was because of the many expansions. IT made so much money because once you got bored of one set of furniture you could go out, spend REAL money to buy more for your pretend sims. I will admit though that it was an awesome game and incredibly addictive... I'm gonna miss it
28 Feb 2010 ~ 3:44am cassie u forgot the sims 3