The Sims 4 Update Adds More Aggressive Ads

Highlights

The Sims 4’s new and aggressive DLC advertising, with a pulsating purchase button in the user interface, has sparked mixed opinions among fans.
New players face spending over a thousand dollars to access all of The Sims 4’s DLC content, despite the game being free-to-play now.
The Sims franchise risks alienating players with aggressive monetization, amid potential competition from upcoming life-simulation games.

The Sims 4 introduced an aggressive way of advertising DLC in its latest and highly controversial update. Over the course of nearly a decade, The Sims 4 has come a long way. Features that were missing in its lackluster launch were slowly introduced through a long list of updates, game packs, and expansions that improved on the base game. However, in order to enjoy the full breadth of content in The Sims 4, new players are expected to spend over a thousand dollars, as the fourth installment of Maxis’ legendary series boasts 15 expansions, and nearly 60 game packs, stuff packs, and kits in its list of DLCs.

Though the developers attempted to make the franchise more accessible to new fans when The Sims 4 became free-to-play in October 2022, the base game largely suffers from the same criticism that The Sims 4 faced on release, in that the content feels limited when compared to the base game of its predecessors. While purchasing DLCs has become easier through the addition of bundle packs, it’s still a daunting financial commitment for any potential player finally willing to give the franchise a shot.

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The Sims 4 Is Adding a Controversial Purchase DLC Button to Its User Interface

As a result, the community has had a mixed opinion on DLCs for The Sims 4, especially after the game’s monetization was placed front-and-center in a recent update. The update, released on February 27, adds a dedicated button to the user interface that guides players towards purchasing game packs. To make matters worse, this button continuously pulses if there is any DLC that the players don’t own yet, and if it hasn’t been pressed for a few minutes. The new user interface for The Sims 4 was demonstrated by Sims Community on Twitter, and was met with severe backlash by fans of the Sims franchise all across social media.

While it’s become an accepted convention to have a premium store button within a game’s user interface, the way it was implemented in The Sims 4 appears to be the main source of criticism. Some players claim that the constant pulsing is causing them anxiety, while others are worried that microtransactions in The Sims 5 will be even more aggressive. Given the overwhelmingly negative feedback provided by the community, it’s highly probable that the developers will remove the pulsating effect from the user interface, but the button itself is likely here to stay.

Though The Sims as a franchise has long stood without a strong competitor, that may not be the case in the near future, as both Paralives and Life By You are expected to challenge The Sims 5, similarly to how Cities: Skylines offered an alternative to SimCity back in 2015. Electronic Arts and Maxis may have an advantage in owning the definitive IP of the life-simulation genre, but it would arguably be better in the long run to not alienate their players with aggressive monetization.