Life sims are in a slump and the only way out is becoming strategy games again

The life sim genre is in a slump. All the omens pointed to a life sim renaissance in 2025 that just didn't happen. Life By You got canned in 2024, Paralives is delayed until later this year, and Inzoi hasn't made quite the splash to revitalize the genre that I'd hoped for. Meanwhile The Sims 4 itself is still beset by save corruption bugs and Sims fans are left in the dark with leaks, rumors, and disappointment over what Project Rene is going to be. So many Sims players are terminally bored and I don't think we're ever truly going to be satisfied unless life sims get a lot harder again.

I grew up obsessively playing The Sims and The Sims 2. I am 'had a family computer in the living room' years old and have distinct memories of setting my radio alarm clock earlier than necessary so I could squeeze in a precious half hour of puppeting the fates of my sims between my bowl of cereal and walking to the bus stop.

I lapsed in my Sims playing for about a decade, missing The Sims 3 entirely on a detour through JRPG and Guild Wars obsessions as a teen, and came back to The Sims 4 as an adult to find that I wasn't particularly interested in Live Mode. I just wanted to build and decorate houses. "I've changed," I thought, perhaps even matured, into a gentle-hearted grownup who just likes designing a nice kitchen island instead of standing outside my crush's house and flirting with them on the sidewalk for six straight hours, ignoring imminent pants-wetting and starvation, until we can WooHoo.

I went back and tried The Sims 3 a few years ago and, to my surprise, I actually had a lot of fun messing around in Live Mode. I actively enjoyed my time as a love-obsessed car thief, a character arc I did not plan, and didn't feel at all that I was forcing myself to try the part of the series I'd been ignoring for so many years.

The missing spice of life

When EA re-released The Sims and The Sims 2 for the series' 25th anniversary last year, I was completely enamored with Live Mode again, this time in The Sims 2's unhinged drama. Sim can die unexpectedly if you make them do dumb things, unplanned romances can sizzle, and you can spend a whole night invested in pursuing a movie career for your dog.

It isn't me who's changed, then. It's life sims that have changed, and not for the better. One of the most common refrains I see from sims players online is asking one another how to keep from getting bored. We're all begging for things to do in a game where we're allegedly able to do almost anything.

The origins of the genre were closer to real-time strategy, just at the intimate scale of a single household. Keeping my sims fed, clean, and showing up to work on time in the original The Sims was a constant plate-spinning performance.

The Sims 4 is so much easier than any other game in the series, never wanting to step on the toes of the player. It timidly asks permission for everything, from a sim declaring they "like" a hobby to a random neighbor making friends with another random neighbor. It's so afraid of letting anything I don't want to happen to my sims that it rarely makes anything interesting happen at all.

That's a stark contrast to going back to The Sims 2 where death, infidelity, and chaos are constantly dogging my sims which, to be clear, kept me way more engaged and entertained.

Inzoi's initial launch last year had similar problems.

The mid-life crisis

Inzoi was just sort of… empty. Inzoi truthers are often quick to remind critics that the game is in early access and understandably lacks many of the expanded life systems players hoped for. But what Inzoi lacks isn't content, it's challenges and consequences.

Each Zoi's basic needs are simultaneously too easy to fill but drain fast enough to nag. The interface is full of interactions and things my zois can choose to do, but there's rarely any reason for me to feel pulled or invested in the choices I'm making. Game updates with interesting dramatic possibilities like criminal activity and jail time feel more like new lines on a pull-string doll than something that's going to challenge how I play.

Inzoi's most recent roadmap post even acknowledges this existential issue, saying: "A key challenge in this genre is that motivation can be hard to sustain. Simulation systems can combine many features to create emergent stories, which can lead to genuinely engaging experiences—but depending on probability, players can also end up with experiences that feel strange or underwhelming."

Underwhelming, exactly.

Despite saying as much, the laundry list of additions Inzoi wants to make feels so focused on stuff like new animations and new interaction bubbles to click, the same thing that's turned The Sims 4 into a shambling DLC zombie. The Sims 4 has spent years being funded by a DLC mill that requires constant horizontal expansion into more parts of life—vacations, apartments, small businesses, funerals, etc—rather than a depth of systems. I feel like I get a more interesting life simulation out of Crusader Kings 3 than The Sims 4.

The way to get all these bored life sim players engaged and excited again is to make them harder again—make them require strategy again. I want to be scraping by when I start a new family, with a simulation that's willing to throw me real curveballs like the stove fires, surprise romantic attractions, and devastating burglaries of old. Those things all exist in The Sims 4, they're all just so easily overcome that they lose my interest.

The current Sims 4 experience should be called a Creative Mode, as one friend put it while commiserating over the state of the series with me. A version of Live Mode mode where guardrails against mistakes are tight and character autonomy is low so that players who love that style are free to play stage director to the drama of their sims' lives without the threat of death and disaster throwing them off course.

But that playstyle should be opted into. The default experience for life sims should go back to its strategy-adjacent roots where needs are a challenge to juggle, mistakes have deadly consequences, and there's never enough time in the day to get everything done. That's the kind of future Sims game that could actually launch a renaissance for the genre, because life sim players are so very, very bored and we aren't above being challenged.