Key Takeaways
- EA won’t develop The Sims 5 due to player investment in The Sims 4 add-ons, erasing progress.
- InZoi and Paralives have an opportunity to fill the market gap left by The Sims 5’s absence.
- Competition from InZoi and Paralives could pressure The Sims 4 to improve content quality and prices.
EA broke the news that it has no plans to develop The Sims 5. This was shocking news to many, who had assumed Project Rene would be The Sims 5. EA’s reasoning was that The Sims 4 players had spent ten years buying add-on content for The Sims 4, and The Sims 5 would require a fresh restart from the beginning, erasing any progress that they had made.
EA’s plans to use The Sims 4 as the foundational experience in The Sims is one strategy, but the market will still feel the gap left by its decision to not develop The Sims 5. This gap in the market gives The Sims 4 competitors, such as InZoi and Paralives, the chance to take the stage while EA is pursuing other strategies.
InZoi and Paralives Could Be The Sims 5 That Players Were Looking For
The Sims has released sequels that have given players new experiences in the previous iterations of The Sims, and while restarting once again was a growing pain, it never did anything to stem the series’ popularity. This is partially because The Sims has never had a serious competitor before, and has dominated the life sim genre for decades. InZoi and Paralives have the perfect chance to gain a foothold in the market because of EA’s reluctance to develop The Sims 5, a move that has made many players hesitant about the future of The Sims and perhaps eager to try alternatives.
The developer of InZoi, KRAFTON, released a demo of InZoi in August for five days. The demo featured InZoi‘s character creator and proved to be incredibly popular. With a hyperrealistic art style that sets itself entirely apart from The Sims 4‘s art style and powerful customization tools that go beyond the character creator, InZoi is likely to be a success on launch thanks to its clever marketing and a massive leap forward in graphics and art style.
Paralives is closer to The Sims 4 in terms of art style, where it has adopted a stylized, cartoon art style that still sets itself apart from The Sims 4. Paralives has not released a demo or its character creator to players like InZoi did, so the reception to it is more difficult to gauge, but if it hits all the right points it could prove to fill the gap that The Sims has left.
Why The Sims Franchise Needs More Competition
The Sims 4 launched in 2014, ten years ago, and has thrived because of the lack of competition in the life sim genre. With no competition comes flaws, such as bugs, missing features that had been present in previous games, loading screens, and barriers to content. All the add-on content in The Sims 4 now costs more than $1,000, and that number will continue to rise with more expansion packs, kits, and stuff packs on the way.
Competition that genuinely threatens to pull players away incentivizes better business practices to keep players. The Sims 4 needs to create better expansion packs that justify a $40 price point, with worlds packed with things to do that feel alive, better gameplay, and mechanics that at least match their counterparts from The Sims 3. The success of InZoi and Paralives means a healthier industry, and will ultimately give fans of life sims the power to choose between different games.