The Sims series is a highly successful series and they made so money they made EA what it is today. Unlike games like Simcity, which has many copy-cats from other gaming companies, the Sims, which is WAY MORE successful (financially), has no real competition. Why? Why don’t the competitors copy-cat and release their own life simulation games? What “moat” does EA have when it comes to the Sims?
There are many life simulation games, just Google them. Why are they not as successful as EA? They’ve been doing it longer, enjoy certain copyright protection, have a dedicated studio to work on only the Sims, and have a large core fan-base.
There are plenty of studios that crank out much smaller sims games and don’t (expect to) make a large profit.
To take on the sims requires one of the big studios to make a huge investment. As simple as these games appear, the quantity of content is one of the main selling points, and cranking out all those animations and getting the AI right takes time.
And, IME (as someone who developed a sims-like game), few big studios want to make a game like this. It’s a genre that has no respect within the industry.
So I would say it’s partly a market failure – I think there’s likely room for one or more big sims-like games (of course they’d have to differentiate themselves in some way).
a quick google search finds this list of “31 games like the Sims”
In particular Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series has a lot in common with the Sims and both series have influenced each other in later editions.
Not really. Animal Crossing is more like Second Life. You control only one character, and the game is designed to be played for 10 minutes at a time, with a lot of the game taking place in real time. It’s more akin to the Sims Freeplay game, an attempt to mix The Sims with browser click farms like Farmville.
To be honest, most of the games on that site aren’t really like The Sims. Most are social games and have you play a single character. Others seem to be other sims that happen to have people thrown in, too. The only one that actually looks like the Sims is the one that explicitly says it is a Sims clone that focuses on the relationship aspect: Singles: Flirt Up Your Life.
It honestly seems that no one knows how to make a game like The Sims without directly ripping it off.
Funny you mention it is a genre that has no respect within the industry lol. Are you refering to life simulation or simulations in general? Do you think the lack of “prestige” or “respect” or whatsoever is because it seemingly doesn’t take a lot of skill and have a lot of female players (I think it is common knowledge that the sims series have more females than males I mean check out youtube lol) ?
Just to be clear, I am not talking about these low-budget crappy flash-based social games. Comparing Sims series to these games is like comparing adventure games like Assasin Creed, Far Cry to games like Super Mario. They are not the same…
Yes all of that. It’s seen as essentially making a doll’s house. Or a soap opera.
While smaller studios are prepared to make such games – because the demand is there – most of the bigger studios are in a position where their brand counts for a lot and don’t want to risk their name.
Like I say, I have a little experience in this. I don’t want to reveal my real-life identity on the Dope, so all I can say is I worked for a developer that was making a sims game that (unusually) had good reason to suppose their game would be successful. But still they had a great deal of difficulty getting a publisher to pick it up.
And I recall a few times having publishers visit the office that would agree it was likely to be a successful game, but say they couldn’t understand the appeal themselves, and for that reason were hesitant to put their name to it.
FWIW I don’t understand the appeal of these games either, but I can separate my heart from my head (figuratively, at least).
But also note that in general big studios are very risk averse. It’s very costly to experiment with different styles of game. There are plenty of examples of very successful developers that went bankrupt due to just one flop.
You can see strains of it in other games, though. Clockwork Empires has a lot of simmish elements, especially in how it handles NPC needs and desires. That said, it’s still more on the side of a “town builder” game that has actual failure conditions than it is the ultimate sandboxyness of the Sims.
Sims seems to straddle a really odd line between control/independence, where you can micromanage every aspect of your family’s life, but can also watch the AI do its things (only intervening for things like jobs). Most games either go less hands on – you can give suggestions or assign jobs to villagers, but not micromanaging except in combat. See Dwarf Fortress, Clockwork Empires, Creatures, Startopia, etc. Or one person control – Animal Crossing, etc.
I’ve occasionally wondered if Maxis or Will Wright (designer of pretty much every SimSomething game) isn’t actually from some other company who makes real simulation environments.
I don’t know what Sim Ant might have been a port of, but Sim Tower was really an elevator system simulator. If you didn’t tune your elevators right with express service, home floors, dwell time, etc., your building wouldn’t do well. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the “game” was being silently backed by someone like Otis or Schindler.
Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun on the surface, but they somehow held me captive for hours at a time.
Will Wright is absolutely not the designer of “pretty much every SimSomething game”, and EA Maxis definitely outsources design and development of many of the games they publish. The last Sim game Wright worked on was Sims 2 and that was over 10 years ago.
In fact, the game design of SimTower that you liked so much had nothing to do with Maxis or Wright; it was a localized version of a Japanese game. The ironic thing is, the Japanese game developer of The Tower, (as it was called in Japan), was influenced and motivated by playing SimCity, which was of course designed by Wright.
This is just a historical reference but The Sims is not an original idea or work. There was a ‘game’ called ‘Little Computer People’ that ran on the Commodore 64 among several other platforms released in 1985. It was well received and popular enough that newer versions were later rolled out to the more capable Commodore Amiga including life expansion packs. I owned it and the similarity with the earliest versions of The Sims was striking. The first time I saw The Sims, I thought that it was just an updated version done by the same people but it wasn’t.
Will Wright admits the same thing:
“The game [Little Computer People] was voted best original game of the year at the Golden Joystick Awards. Will Wright, designer of The Sims, has mentioned playing Little Computer People, and receiving valuable feedback on The Sims from its designer, Rich Gold.”
I am glad that game format was able to be updated to reflect better hardware so that newer generations could appreciate it but it was far from a new concept.
Making a game like the Sims is difficult from a programming point of view. Programming artificial intelligence is hard, and The Sims is all about varied and realistic AI behavior.
In most platformers, each NPC (non-player character) just needs to attack the player and follow a movement pattern. In first-person shooters, the programmer has to add other combat-related actions to these NPCs, such as tracking enemies and seeking cover. In a life simulation like The Sims, each NPC (in this case a Sim) has to react to a wide variety of stimuli, from fire to music to food. Leave a Sim alone, and it will go about “living” in its home in a way dictated by its AI. Then, every Sim can react to every other Sim: they can dance together, have conversations, or have varying degrees of relationships. Finally, NPC reactions can evolve: Sims can learn new skills, or acquire new objects to play with, or grow more or less friendly with other Sims. It’s a whole lot of factors to take into account, and when other games try to simulate a fraction of them the results are clearly less evolved and less realistic.
I assume part of it is because EA has such a strong lock on “The Sims” style game play in people’s minds.
One of the interviews with the developers of the new Cities: Skylines game by Paradox games, the project leader talks about how she went to Paradox about making the game and was shown interest. Then EA announced development on SimCity 2013 and Skylines was shelved. It wasn’t until the last SimCity crashed and burned that they went back and saw an opening the market for another such game. The other “main” city sim is Cities XL which has never been very popular.
I can imagine that a Sims-style game faces the same issues. There’s only so much of a market for that style of game and EA has that market pretty tightly locked up to risk the cost of developing an essential clone of a popular product. Even a genre with a much larger audience, such as military shooters, you have two main games (Call of Duty & Battlefield) and smaller games tend to be shorter lived (Titanfall) or more niche (Counterstrike). Trying to convince someone that there’s space in the market for another Sims game is tough, especially when you know a giant like EA will be working against you.
God, I don’t know what it was about that one but Sim Tower found that “rat pushes a button until it starves” part of my brain and I spent like a year of college not getting out and doing stuff that now I wish I had because, dude, Sim Tower.