Recently, one of our major news items was Krafton’s push to bring their life sim Inzoi to consoles. It’s not an altogether surprising move, considering there’s been plenty of interest as to where the usually mobile-first developer is going to bring their Sims 4 competitor. But it also made me think of another thing, why exactly did The Sims 4 never take off on console?
Well, as you might expect, I’ve managed to boil it down to four reasons why.
Poor performance
While not gamebreaking by any means, performance on consoles has often paled in comparison to PC. A big part of this can be attributed to the proprietary engine SmartSim – as while I’m no expert on game development, I think it’s fair to argue that a PC-first engine can be difficult to adapt for console at the best of times.
The poor performance of The Sims 4 did improve drastically on new generation consoles. But new issues arose, such as missing DLC after some content was removed from services such as PlayStation+.
While The Sims 4 for console has been receiving attention, it still lags behind the PC version simply because – I’d argue – it was a second thought.
Lack of custom content
The big one, undoubtedly. Consoles and mods have had a sticky relationship over the years. No doubt due to the difficulty many of them present. I remember when Skyrim introducing mods to its console versions was seen as an unbelievably sea-change, but sadly this hasn’t happened with The Sims 4.
We often talk about custom creator content and EA’s interplay with it, but that didn’t translate to console. No doubt due to the performance issues as well, but it means that even additional clothing and furniture you’d otherwise easily be able to nab from The Sims Resource are absent.
Little in the way of flexibility
A major issue that many of you playing on console have probably already encountered ties into the aforementioned performance issues. I think it’s fair to say that Simmers tend to juggle many families and save their games as they play, but the PlayStation version of The Sims 4 still limits players to a very miserly 10 save slots.
Meanwhile, additional content brings the game to a crawl for many, meaning some have to pick and choose what content to include. An issue that was seemingly fixed in the PlayStation 5 version with the greater hardware capabilities. That just leaves the lacklustre control scheme, which has been a contentious point for many players.
Lack of long-term support
The final point is a little bit more subjective. There seems to be a widespread feeling that The Sims 4 for console hasn’t had the same amount of attention paid to it in terms of bugfixes and maintenance.
But I think it’s fair to point out that EA and Maxis have continued to (mostly) keep it on par with the PC versions in terms of features and haven’t abandoned it completely.
But, at the same time, it’s not hard to see why people might feel otherwise with issues that have cropped up, such as the longtime problem with Gallery content causing save files to become corrupted.
While these are usually, eventually squashed, it’s not hard to see why many feel this sort of stuff wouldn’t be accepted by the larger PC playerbase persisting as long as it did.
Ultimately, the question to be asked is whether The Sims 4 could ever work well on console. From the get-go, using a controller makes it far more slower-paced, while the natural hardware limitations means that there are always issues cropping up that need fixing.
If The Sims 4 on console perhaps had exclusive content or other enticing features, it might have grasped a larger playerbase. But unfortunately, it seems that the main problem is and will remain that it feels to many like a lesser version of the PC hit.
