User blog comment:LostInRiverview/Where We're Going/@comment-4754309-20120728081117/@comment-1519608-20120802164447

TS1, 2, and 3 will always hold an appeal for people, no matter what new games come out. A lot of that's nostalga - going back and remembering how it used to be. I still fire up The Sims Complete Collection for that reason. There are aspects of every version that are good, that are unique, that aren't met by the other versions. Even if you could argue that TS3 is better than its predecessors in some ways, certainly the earlier games still have some things that TS3 does not, or some aspect of them is different in a positive sense.

Additionally, I'd be very surprised if TS4 didn't have expansions. There's no way the base game could possibly accommodate all the features players want, nor would EA want to put all that in one game at the expense of being able to sell expansions down the road.