The Sims Mobile is Shutting Down Next Year (theverge.com) 17
The Sims is in a period of transition -- and as part of that, the ongoing mobile version will be shutting down in a few months. From a report: EA announced that today's update for The Sims Mobile will be its last, and that on January 20th, 2026 the game "will no longer be accessible to play and will be sunset." The mobile iteration of the franchise first launched in 2018, and has seen more than 50 updates since then. EA says that starting today players will no longer be able to spend real money in the game, and that it will be delisted on both iOS and Android tomorrow before the servers shut down completely next year, making it entirely unplayable.
Seems kind of sudden (Score:1, Troll)
I wonder if there are enough players left to attract the lawyer for a class action lawsuit. They're going to be people who bought stuff and only got to use it for a couple of months. The last couple of times I saw a major mobile game shut down I think they gave it at least 6 months notice after shutting off microtransactions.
I'm guessing Big Data means EA has already calculated that there isn't enou
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"sometime next year" is doing a lot of legwork but you just know the exact date isn't coming from anyone besides their general counsel to avoid that very thing.
The articles mentions their next-gen Sims game coming to all platforms so this is getting out in front of that but considering the last time EA tried to next-gen a Will Wright property was the historically botched 2012 always-online SimCity reboot, I would expect the name numbskullery to be present here, EA isn't exactly one to learn lessons.
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It was that and so many other things, a release so bad it killed the franchise and another studio (Cities Skylines) was able to pretty much take all the business for the genre. Kinda sad SimCity is a dead franchise.
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I never buy games from EA, and this is one of the reasons why.
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Not that I would bother with these kind of micro transactions just because there's plenty of better places for my money to go for entertainment but still.
I think the issue is that the way stuff like this is structured it doesn't clearly indicate how temporary your purchases are. That's on purpose. Making the purchases feel permanent increases their relative
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>I mean I have put quite a bit of money into arcade cabinets back in the day so I'm not completely opposed to the idea of temporary entertainment.
I don't think there's any comparison here really. A subscription MMORPG is the modern equivalent of dropping a quarter into a pacman cabinet; a series of hard boosts and purchases, soft boosts with the expectation that the consequences persist- these things all assume the game will go on as long as it plausibly can. Games with a decent amount of active player
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I wonder if there are enough players left to attract the lawyer for a class action lawsuit
Good luck with that. I'm guessing the EULA requires:
A) Arbitration (rather than lawsuits) for all disputes.
B) Acceptance of the fact that EA can shut the game down at any time for any reason and you don't get any money back at all.
I recently had a thermometer - a physical thermometer - get remotely bricked by the shutdown of the app. A $100 device and Whirlpool gave me a $20 "gift card" that is basically not usable anywhere.
The consumer always loses.
Sure wish we had compulsory licensing (Score:2, Interesting)
Then somebody else could keep the game running.
It would be even better if EOL meant end of copyright/patent protection
Transitioning? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Sims is in a period of transition
It identifies as GACHA.
Does this mean it will finally be playable? (Score:2)
There hasn't been a playable mobile version of the sims since the flip phone versions.
Everything for android/ios has been this "free" but you have to pay to breathe bullshit.
With the official version shutting down does that mean a modded actually playable version without having to spend 4,000 years waiting or $50,000 on paid skips will become available?
What is it? (Score:1)
What is "the sim mobile" ?
Re:What is it? (Score:4, Funny)
It's a kind of electronic slot machine where people can purchase short bursts of dopamine with a credit card.
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Another reason not to trust EA.
We need Dark Ages on mobile. (Score:2)
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If the entire internet gets enshitified and put on dumb ass subscriptions whilst simultaneously getting jacked to the eyeball with useless chatbots, I'm pretty sure a Dark Age is coming for us all.
I mean shit, have a read of social media, its all lunatics screaming at each other about how tylenol causes autism *somehow*, the earth is flat, climate change isnt real and jews and scientists are all in on some vast conspiracy to make everyone die FOR SOME REASON.
My friend, the dark ages arived on mobiles over
Simpsons game... (Score:2)
EA had a Simpsons game that they killed last year. A friend had been playing it since the beginning, and she was actively upset about it.
The problem with these "freemium" games is that they cost the company money for people to play... bandwidth, storage of whatever data they're collecting, etc. ... so once you get to the point where the "whales" aren't spending stupid amounts of money to buy your "premium currency", you now have the casual players costing you money.
One solution would be to reduce to tracki