The franchise builds on our own fantasies about how we live our lives. The metrics of success do not have to be explained, because they are inherently ours: Make more money, get a promotion, get married. It is easy to understand what is expected from the player and the Sim alike: The actions and choices are intuitive, learned from our own life experiences. The genius of the original Sims PC franchise lies in its approachability. We are all game developers and understand very well how hard it is not only to launch but also to grow a game. Our goal, as always, is to deconstruct what successful games do right and to understand what keeps other not-so-successful games from reaching their potential.
The game failed due to much simpler and obvious reason: poor design that didn't deliver to what made the Sims a great franchise in the first place. But the Sims Mobile didn't fail because it's a sequel. After all, there are more than enough warning examples. It would be easy to make a case, based on numbers, that launching sequels on mobile is not the way to go about it. It took less than a month for the 6-year-old Sims FreePlay start outperforming the sequel in terms of revenue despite the fact that Sims Mobile daily installs were over four times higher during the same period of time.
Yet despite the fantastic visuals, long soft launch and the support of an internal benchmark, Sims Mobile tumbled down. The Sims Mobile launched globally in early March 2018 after a long and tumultuous soft-launch, during which massive changes to the game mechanics were made.
After four major releases on PC/consoles and countless DLCs, EA and Maxis came with a sequel to a 6-year-old Sims FreePlay, which has racked up close to 300 million installs and over 300 million in IAP bookings (source: Sensor Tower) The sandbox life simulation has not only defined its own genre but counts among the top-selling game series ever and all major platforms.
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