EA shared an announcement on October 19th that they would be shutting down The Sims Mobile’s servers in early 2026. From January 20th, players will no longer be able to play the mobile life sim or access any of their save data.
In their official announcement, The Sims Team clarifies that it won’t be possible to play The Sims Mobile after the closure date. This is because the app requires online servers to function properly.
So, after the app shuts down, the game will essentially be no more.
This decision doesn’t come as the biggest surprise. Back in January 2024, it was announced that the app wouldn’t receive any new events. Instead, they would recycle fan favourites from throughout the years. Although the official blog post reassured Simmers that the servers would remain active at the time, it’s clear that this was the start of game over for The Sims Mobile.
Why do servers get shut down for online games?
Expense. One of the most significant reasons why a game’s servers could be shut down is due to running costs.
If a game uses an online server, that means the company is always paying to make sure they’re working properly. Keeping a development team on board for a game is also costly. Employees and contractors need to be paid for their time. As a result, any time spent updating or maintaining a game is money.
If a title isn’t turning over a large enough profit to be worthwhile to the company, then it’s unlikely they’ll keep it going. This can happen when a title doesn’t have a large playerbase or if it’s not making many in-app sales.
No specific reason was shared for the closure of The Sims Mobile. I would tend to assume that the reason for ending support for any game would tend to be financial. But considering that 2025 was a financially “historic” year for The Sims, and that mobile gaming generated around $1.1 billion for the company in 2025, it’s a slightly tough pill to swallow.
The press release shared for the Electronic Arts financial report on May 6th 2025 did not include a specific breakdown of the profits produced by The Sims Mobile.
Preserving games is an expensive effort
A similar financial point was made in the Internet Archive’s Vanishing Culture Report. Video games are expensive and labour-intensive to support, reissue, port, or preserve in any other meaningful way.
Of course, communities can try to resurrect lost and lost-ish video games like The Sims Mobile themselves. And they have, many times, with varying degrees of success – whether it’s the fanmade Toontown Rewritten, the Elder Scrolls Renewal Project, or even the scrubbed-up version of The Sims 1 created with Unreal Engine.
However, as glorious as these fanworks may be, they run the risk of facing legal troubles should the original creators choose to step in and make any claims. Plus, the game could end up changing and being reworked as it gets rebuilt.
Shutting down games hurts consumers
While the decision is perhaps expected – and was likely to happen eventually – it’s still an awful time for anyone who was playing The Sims Mobile. If you’ve spent any meaningful chunk of the past seven years playing the game, you’re bound to be disappointed by that door closing.
Server-based games almost always have a timer on them. Features degrade, entire playstyles become unavailable, and updates end. The lack of permanence is an uncomfortable but currently integral part of modern gaming.
Understandably, there’s a lot of consumer pushback against this kind of tactic, even in the wider life sim genre. Just recently, Fae Farm announced it would be ending updates and support for online multiplayer only two years after launch.
However, following a maximum community backlash, a new publisher took over to continue supporting and updating the game.
Similarly, you might’ve heard of a consumer movement known as Stop Killing Games. This organisation aims to push back against what they describe as video games being sold with an unseen “expiration date.” By this, they mean a point in the future that it will become defunct or unplayable by.
Of course, this logic doesn’t completely apply to games like The Sims Mobile. It was – or is, until January – a free game. You didn’t buy anything. Except, of course, for any microtransactions you might’ve made in-game with real money.
But how you purchase, or didn’t purchase, a game doesn’t change that it feels rough to lose access to it for good. And, of course, that’s without even getting into how it must feel for the team who were working on it to see their work pulled from the proverbial shelves.
The Sims franchise has a long history of pulling the plug on online games – and it impacts digital preservation
It’s also far from the first time a Sims game has disappeared into the mists of time. There’s a long list of lost Sims games, ranging from better-known titles like The Sims Online, to the Facebook-based The Sims Social, to the community-created The Sims Carnival.
And, of course, there are titles that didn’t even make it to release, like the cancelled Simsville. That’s without getting started on Sims titles that are now technically abandonware due to a lack of availability and support.
The permanent closure of server-based video games without them being properly backed up (and therefore playable) in one way or another leads to the creation of lost media. For media to be considered lost, it generally needs to no longer exist.
Sometimes, lost media is found – like a recording of a radio show on an old cassette tape. Other times, it remains lost, often due to being permanently destroyed. An infamous example is the BBC’s lost broadcasts.
Lost media is exponentially more difficult – or even impossible – for archivists, historians, and other researchers to study. Video games are regularly researched in both academic and non-academic contexts. If you chose to study any of The Sims’ many internet-based spin-offs that have cropped up over the years, you’d be in for a very challenging time.
Many video games aren’t preserved well or at all
Video game archiving faces some particular challenges. A lot of software isn’t archived at all, or is incredibly hard to come by. In 2023, a study published by the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network found that almost 90% of historical video games are inaccessible without using specialist libraries or hardware.
Games that disappear from online servers create a unique issue here. It’s not just that they aren’t accessible without hard-to-come-by and expensive hardware. It’s that they have the chance of completely disappearing off the face of the earth when they shut down. This is a very possible reality for The Sims Mobile.
If a few years down the line, you decide to study Project Rene to find out how earlier online Sims games influenced it, you’d be in for a tough time. Yes, there would be some records of Let’s Plays and promotional materials. But, you’d still have information gaps all over the place based on the fact that you wouldn’t be able to try it out first-hand.
What does this approach say about Project Rene?
Based on what we already know about Project Rene, we know it’s going to be another multiplayer game with mobile capabilities.
Based on Catherine’s deep dive during the Early Access playtest on Android, City Life Game With Friends – which is likely to be Project Rene – definitely looks to be in the same vein as games like The Sims Mobile, Freeplay, Online, and all of the other online titles in the Simsiverse.
This makes me wonder two things. Firstly, has The Sims Mobile been killed off to make way for Project Rene? We don’t know exactly when it’s set to come out, after all. We could be leading up to a big announcement, for all we know.
And secondly, could Project Rene also be left to crumble and disappear, if and when the next iteration of Sims spin-offs rolls around? Well, it’s not impossible – particularly if it also operates using online servers.
The only answer I can give right now to either of those questions is ‘maybe’. We won’t know for certain until that time rolls around, if ever.
Is shutting down The Sims Mobile the right thing to do?
Yes and no. On one hand, it’s probably time. The franchise is moving onto pastures new, with Project Rene somewhere on the horizon. Shifting focus to other avenues isn’t a bad thing.
It’s also not strictly speaking EA’s responsibility to archive games. At least, not as much as it is anyone else’s. As noted in the Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States, game preservation is a systemic issue, and the result of the actions of many different individuals and companies over time.
EA is, however, responsible for making it so that The Sims Mobile is entirely unplayable.
Creating these circumstances doesn’t really seem like the way to go. In an ideal world, The Sims Mobile would be ported in some way so it isn’t dependent on online servers, with any local gameplay elements still being functional.
Sure, it would be a stripped-back experience – but it would be better than losing a title completely. Both for anyone who’s sunk hours into playing it, and for anyone who hopes to research it in the future.
