As a relatively new form of art, video gaming has its share of bumps in the road to overcome as it develops and continues to surge in popularity. With innovations in tech and the development of live services, the issue of microtransactions has become a serious problem in recent years, with game developers trying to find a balance between trying to get returns on their games while players don't want to be exploited.
YouTuber Aztecross recently published a video criticizing Bungie's practice of microtransactions in Destiny 2, which have escalated in recent years. In summary, it criticizes Bungie's introduction of Character Boosting and the ability to buy Season Rank. Destiny 2's microtransaction practices have gotten worse in recent years, and Aztecross argues they've officially crossed over into "pay-to-win territory". This is where The Sims 4 and its own controversies come in.
Microtransactions In The Sims 4
The problem of microtransactions mostly lies with online games; most single-player games have escaped the trend mostly unscathed due to their nature of a single-player experience with minimal live services that don't go beyond a few content expansions and support updates. However, The Sims 4, owned by EA, a company renowned for their egregious missteps in regard to microtransactions in the past, has come under fire recently for their practice of splitting content across packs and charging for it.
The Sims 4 doesn't seem the most obvious candidate for microtransactions, but the series has faced controversy regarding its add-ons for several years now. The controversy was greatest when Kits were first announced, but criticism aimed at the developer for splitting content across packs and charging for something that would ordinarily be shipped in one expansion pack in previous games in The Sims has been brought up years before, originating with the release of The Sims 4: Cats & Dogs. Cats & Dogs was The Sims 4 version of the usual pets pack that's been present in every iteration of The Sims, and was missing masses of content that had been present in some form in previous Sims games: small pets such as lizards, birds, and hamsters, and horses from The Sims 3: Pets.
The Sims 4's Split Content and The Introduction of Kits
Just a few months later, The Sims 4: My First Pet Stuff was released, with the content many Simmers argued had been missing from the Cats & Dogs pack, including new outfits for the cats and dogs and small pets that had been excluded from the original pack. Essentially, players had to pay extra for content that, in the past, had been included in one expansion pack. This wasn't the last time this would happen, with Stuff Packs and Kit announcements following Expansion releases with content that suspiciously followed the same theme as the expansion that had just been released, examples of which include The Sims 4: Cottage Living and the Country Kitchen Kit which followed soon after.
In January 2021, the Paranormal Stuff Pack was released and, despite the overwhelmingly positive reception for it, it was the last Stuff Pack to be released as of June 2023. Instead, The Sims developer has shifted its focus to releasing Kits, which are small bundles of content that each cost $5 and contain 15–25 build or CAS items.
$5 seems like a small amount, but Kits are released with far more regularity than any other content pack, often have little to no gameplay, and are often just cosmetic additions or, as previously mentioned, suspected to be leftover content from Expansion packs that's now being monetized. Often, there's barely enough content in a Kit to sufficiently furnish a single room.
For a game that's a single-player experience, The Sims 4 is already prohibitively expensive if the player wants to invest in all the content. The total cost of all the add-on content in The Sims 4 is over $1,050. There's no "pay to win" mechanic in The Sims 4, but to get any enjoyment from playing The Sims 4 and to get access to the vast majority of the content that makes the game playable beyond a dozen hours, buying much of the add-on content is necessary.
Another issue is that gating content behind a paywall and timing releases with free updates, so said gating feels worse for players who don't buy the new content, is a particularly egregious practice. The recent Infant update that came with The Sims 4: Growing Together is an example of this, where the new Infant life stage was given to all players as a part of a free update, but essential Infant gameplay such as changing tables and Infant milestones were only available after purchasing Growing Together which released two days after the Infant update.
The Sims 4 Base Game is Essentially a Free Trial
Aztecross notes the difference between a Free Trial and Free to Play, and it's an observation that's relevant regarding The Sims 4's strategy towards content add-ons. While the base game of The Sims 4 has been free for some years now, much of the very basic gameplay mechanics that make it worth playing are locked behind hundreds of dollars of Expansions, Game Packs, Stuff Packs, and now Kits, making this a confusing landscape for new players who don't know what they need to create the experience they want when playing the game.
The base game is essentially a free trial of the real experience of The Sims 4, a problem that's persisted since its very shaky launch in 2014 that excluded a lot of the gameplay and items that have been an essential part of The Sims franchise for decades such as pools, terrain tools, basements, toddlers, and even more complicated mechanics such as a memory system.
Most of these have since been added to the game in free updates, but as recently as Growing Together, Simmers have been vocal that a lot of the paid content should have been a part of The Sims to begin with, and many players in the community are worried about the replacement of Stuff Packs with Kits, claiming it's a step backward rather than towards solving the problems the community has about feeling like they're paying double for the same content.
The Sims 4 is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox One.
