EA and Maxis have announced that their premier social simulation game, The Sims 4 will be going free to play on 18th October 2022. From that point on the base game will be free to download and play across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and, of course, PC.
“With The Sims 4 going free to play,” EA writes in the announcement post, “our team is more dedicated than ever to developing new and meaningful The Sims 4 experiences for our players and we will continue to develop and release packs, kits and Sims Delivery Express drops into the foreseeable future.”
More details on what’s next for The Sims 4 will be revealed during a Behind The Sims Summit stream on 18th October at 6PM UK time.
While the base game is going free, everyone knows you really want to get some expansion packs (which is how the game keeps on spinning money out of thin air). EA Play and EA Play Pro members will have an upgraded experience with a few expansions thrown in for good measure. The Sims 4 EA Play Edition includes the Get To Work expansion, while EA Play Pro Edition includes both Get To Work and the Toddler Stuff Pack.
And if you ponied up cash for The Sims 4 at any point in the last 8 years, then from 14th September to 17th September, players who load up and log into the game will receive the Desert Luxe Kit as a thank you gift.
Originally releasing in 2014, The Sims 4 has shown much greater longevity that its predecessors – The Sims 3 had a five year spell before it was superseded. There’s probably a few reasons for this, not least because of the growing pains that each new Sims game had to go through with people complaining about missing features and content compared to the fully expanded previous release, but also because of the shift from physical to digital that has occurred over the past 10-15 years.
The Sims 4 expansions are now easier than ever to buy online, Maxis can make major changes to the game and deliver them through patches, and they also adapted the game to suit consoles in 2017. As ever, it’s really with the expansions that EA and Maxis make money, so at this point it makes sense to go free to play and keep The Sims 4 as a platform for a steady stream of content updates and expansions.
Source: EA