User blog comment:LostInRiverview/The Death of a Franchise/@comment-26744861-20120513101026

The way things are going, The Sims will turn out like the SimCity series: Popular thanks to a few great games, followed by a fall from grace thanks to one below average game and finally rebooted and sent "back to its roots" with Maxis being touted as the developer.

The Sims is a casual series that appeals to a very wide variety of people of both genders, taste amongst a whole load of other things and this is coming from someone who mainly seems to play games involving people dying.

From EA's point of view, they see this whole "selling out" scheme as a good marketing model - they expect people to buy these things regardless because they already have the fanbase. The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 - people were free to do whatever; The Sims 3 is a different story. They saw the increase of broadband speeds over a decade as an excuse to force unwanted features on players such as in-game external advertising (something which EA are pretty notable for), engine "modifications" which renders custom content unusable and some machines unable to play the game. The Sims 2 just had one bug fix patch for each EP and then that's it.

In a list of franchises that desperately need to be rebooted (Call of Duty!!!), it's sad to say that The Sims is not too far away from becoming one of them.