See? And there’s the issue. People can ask for these things and they do, but they do it without giving a crap about what creating those features actually means for the developers. First of all, they always have to think about how certain features would work with a game. That, at least in my eyes, shoves a University expansion FAR down on the priorities list. Don’t get me wrong, I loved that expansion in Sims 3, but I always hated it in Sims 2. To me, it is a theme that needs an open world. Of course, I don’t know how the developers think of it, but I can imagine that at least some of them share my opinion.
Then they have to consider how involved certain features are and what they will mean for the future of the game. Get Together added the club system, which is meant to expand with every new addition to the game. It only made sense to incorporate that system as early as possible, so they don’t have to go back and make every single pack they released in the past work with that new system. Instead they now just have to add on to it when they come up with new features that make sense for the club system. It’s also why Seasons is always released pretty late into every game’s cycle. It’s not so much connected to code, but textures. Creating them is less of a hassle when you just have to change the colour of already existing textures instead of creating every single future texture twice. It also gives you a chance to test for compatibility issues with older packs all at once instead of doing it for every new expansion.

And then there is the big one: time. In game development, only money is a more important criteria than time. Creating game takes time, a lot of it. Same goes for expansions. Some take less time, others a hell of a lot more. Pets is THE prime example here. Sims 2 Pets took an entire year to develop, despite being worked on non-stop in the background. Sims 3 Pets went even further, as game development had gotten far more involved over the years. They started developing that EP right after the base game launched and it took TWO years to be completed. So it’s beyond ridiculous to expect Sims 4 Pets for at least another year.

Listening to players is all nice and good, but sometimes players just don’t think about how much sense something makes. They can’t throw half-finished dogs at us after a few months just because people demand pets. And we wouldn’t want them either, would we? For all issues I’ve got with the people behind the Sims 4 marketing, the developers are no idiots! They know what they are doing and believe me, they know better what’s good for the game at what point in time than we do.

Look, we are all entitled to our opinions about this game and obviously I loved TS1-TS4, so it’s a little bothersome that I’m ready to spend my money just not on things that almost NO FAN has asked for. If the Sims producers are dumping their fan base of us adults (who have money to spend) in favor of tweens who will use their parents money to buy anything coming out, so be it. It’s just irritating.

XD I swear, this conversation HAS happened.