The Sims: From Hot Date To Get Famous, Why Expansion Packs Have Been Key To The Game's Longevity

(MENAFN- The Conversation) SimCity 3000, the predecessor to The Sims, played a pivotal part in my childhood, growing up in Hyderabad, India. Its recreation of the western, urban world helped me understand how cities were planned, designed and financed – and how they provided people with key services like transportation, health and education while preparing for accidents and other hazards.

As an eight-year-old trying to figure out my place in the world, that game offered me a way to make meaning of the chaos that can be life. So, when The Sims launched in 2000 – enabling me to live inside a virtual city, rather than simply build one – I had to get my hands on a copy.

Twenty-five years later, I write this piece in a drastically different gaming landscape, where games offer high visual fidelity and ever-increasing frame rates for ultra-smooth game play. But despite all these technological innovations and the pursuit of photo-realism, the popularity of The Sims' game designer Will Wright's satire on American consumer culture endures.

Sul Sul! This article is part of a mini series from The Conversation marking 25 years of The Sims franchise.

The franchise's four Sims games had sold over 200 million copies before the latest instalment, The Sims 4, became free to play in 2022 . Players now spend their money on extras within the game. Over 85 million people played The Sims worldwide in 2024.

At a time when the success of a modern video game is measured in metrics like“cumulative engagement time” (number of players playing at the same time), acquisition of new players and“intensity of engagement” (number of hours spent by a player), now-over-a-decade-old The Sims 4 continues to excel with its mastery of the live-service format.

Live-service describes the form modern digital games embrace when they transition from conventional products into“services” – a shift made possible because games today can be regularly updated, fixed and expanded upon by their makers remotely. They can acquire new levels and in-game features in a similar way to how streaming platforms like Netflix drop new episodes of your favourite show.

Players don't buy a live-service game, they sign up for the journey.

In each incarnation of The Sims, players have been able to access new ways to perform roles and tasks that mimic everyday life, in the form of expansions and content packs.

The original title, The Sims (2000), had seven expansion packs and two content packs. I distinctly remember brewing potions in the chemistry lab and rubbing a magic lamp to conjure a genie in the first expansion, Livin' Large ; the new holiday island that was built for The Sims: Vacation ; and leaving my Sim's home to visit downtown areas as part of Hot Date .

But for The Sims 4 (2014), the developers went all in. This game – and its subsequent expansions – represents a digital supermarket of lifestyles, sub-cultures, activities and stardom. For example, 2018's Get Famous pack not only introduced Del Sol Valley – a region that resembled Los Angeles and the Hollywood Hills – but also introduced the“reputation” mechanism for players.

The Discover University expansion (2019) allowed players to take their Sims to school in a new region called Britechester – after this update, the game integrated Sims' careers and education, and in many ways changed the rules of the game. And the Eco Lifestyle expansion pack (2020) is memorable because the game engaged with ideas of sustainable living for the first time.

From content packs featuring a digital recreation of singer Katy Perry in The Sims 3 to collaborations with streamers , content creators and fashion houses , The Sims has remained relevant by consistently blurring the lines between genre, reality and fantasy.

Today, video game makers the world over try to master formats like free-to-play games where players pay for cosmetic items, customisations and added content, or expansions offering downloadable content. The Sims set the standard for most of them.

Over the past 25 years, this franchise has had several life simulation competitors in the form of Second Life, Facebook's once popular Farmville, virtual reality experiences like Half-Life: Alyx and, during the pandemic when we worked, learnt and played online, initiatives like the Metaverse.

However, today only The Sims endures. The game's developers continue to give its players what they want, while also getting them to engage with difficult ideas like sustainability, the question of life and death, and even gentrification (For Rent expansion pack, anyone?).

Few games let players critique life so closely. For game researchers like me, this begs the question: do people play life simulation games like The Sims in order to build alternative lives, relive their own – or create something entirely new?

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