Could The Next Sims 4 Expansion Break Your Sex Mods – Or Even Put Them Behind A Paywall?
The next big expansion for The Sims 4, Lovestruck, is going to be a momentous one. It’s slated to dramatically overhaul the game’s romance mechanics to add depth and better reflect the social dynamics we experience in real life–including a new romantic skill for your sims to level up. The free update that will accompany the new content will even introduce new relationship preferences (including polyamory) for those who don’t shell out the $40 that Lovestruck costs. All of that, on its own in a vacuum, sounds pretty good. But there’s just one little issue: Most of the features Lovestruck will charge money for were already modded into the game years ago for free.
I’m not trying to question the point of buying Lovestruck given that fact–lots of folks play The Sims 4 without mods, either because they play on Xbox or PlayStation where they literally cannot, or because that’s just not their bag, baby. There are players for whom all this stuff will be new, or who can’t get it any other way, so even abstractly there’s a clear market reason for doing this.
But for those of us who do use mods and custom content in The Sims 4, which is many people, this new expansion inspires some big questions, because video game publishers don’t usually like it when free mods do the same thing as an official paid release–even if the mods were there first. And in this case, those free mods–like Wonderful Whims/Wicked Whims, and the SimDa Dating App–are extremely well established and have been among the most-popular mods available for The Sims 4 on Curseforge since they were created