Don’t Hold Your Breath for The Sims 5 — EA Announces New Update Plans for The Sims 4

The Sims 4 has been going strong for ten years now, and it turns out developer EA has no plans to change that. EA announced that there won’t be a Sims 5 — at least for the time being — as it commits to continuing updates for the current game. On top of that, The Sims 4 will soon start selling asset packs created by players, a move which will hopefully go over better than similar features in other games.

EA vice president Kate Gorman says it’s continuing to update The Sims 4 rather than releasing a sequel in order to keep players from having to start from scratch with the new release, according to Variety. That makes some sense, as players have now invested a decade into the current game, and replacing that with a shiny new version could be more trouble than it’s worth, even if The Sims 4 could benefit from plenty of updates that might come in a sequel. On the other hand, it could be a struggle to get the ten-year-old game up to speed with what players would expect from a new release. New DLC for The Sims 4 typically introduce plenty of bugs that need to be worked out before players can actually enjoy what’s new, so there’s reason to fear that keeping the game around longer will only add to its instability.

To address that concern, EA is working on a host of updates for The Sims 4. Earlier this year, it formed a team to focus specifically on making improvements to core features of the game, and a new patch focused on technical fixes is out today.

Beyond just updating the base game, EA announced some much bigger changes coming as well. The biggest shift comes in the form of Creator Kits. Beginning this November, content packs created by The Sims 4 players will be sold in EA’s store. As EA points out, this is the first time it’s officially sold asset packs made by independent creators. Since they’re official products, The Sims 4 Creator Kits will also be available for purchase by console players, who have traditionally been locked out of the Sims PC modding scene.

Creator Kits could be a good way to expand what’s available in The Sims 4, but there are also some reasons to be concerned. Since the kits need EA’s approval, there’s a limit to how free creators will be to chase their bliss in what kind of assets they produce, and it’s unclear so far what sort of cut EA will be taking from sales.

The whole idea calls to mind Bethesda’s infamously disastrous implementation of paid mods, which was met with widespread criticism from players, though paid mods did return earlier this year in the form of Creations, which garnered much less resistance.

EA also had updates to share on Project Rene, a mysterious project once thought to be The Sims 5, but is now revealed as a multiplayer spinoff of the Sims series. While details are still sparse, EA says it’s holding an invite-only playtest this fall. To register for a chance to try it out, players will need to sign up with The Sims Labs, a recently announced initiative to test “new experimental ways to play The Sims.”

“We know that there is an opportunity to play in a very social, real time, multiplayer environment within our game space,” Gorman told Variety. “We know simulation is at the core of everything we do and we want to make sure our players still have that experience they want, but in a world with real players and NPCs.”

Plenty of Sims players will doubtlessly be disappointed that they won’t be getting the sequel many have been waiting on, but there may be some truth to the idea that losing everything you’ve made in The Sims 4 over the past decade would be a worse outcome. However it shakes out, EA is clearly willing to buck tradition with how it releases updates for the series. Whether that turns out to be a boon for The Sims or a huge misstep is still yet to be seen.