The Sims 4's most notorious sex mod gets launched 400,000 times a day, which is more people than I realized were even playing The Sims every day
Boldly I will log onto the internet today and admit I am boring. I've never installed Wicked Whims. The notorious adult content addon is one of the biggest Sims 4 mods out there, quickly updated after every official patch as fans lament they can't bear to play without it. It sure feels like everyone but me is Wicked-pilled, which may not be far from the truth: The mod's creator says that it gets launched an astonishing 400,000 times per day.
German news site Taz (Die Tageszeitung) published an interview this week with Turbodriver, the modder behind Wicked Whims and its less naughty equivalent Wonderful Whims. It's a bit of a drive-by in which Turbodriver only briefly touches on topics like being compensated for modding, access to adult content online, and whether he finds his mods controversial.
The details about himself he's willing to share (his identity not among them), mostly boil down to not seeing himself as an educator or an activist. Wicked Whims has contraception, explicit sex, and abortion, but that's in pursuit of the realism that players want more than making a statement, he claims.
What was way more enlightening to me was the girthy daily player count that Turbodriver estimated. Translated from German by Google Translate, Turbodriver said that Wicked Whims is used 400,000 per day. "That's how often my server is pinged, at least, because someone starts the game and has installed the mod."
That's not 400,000 unique users per day, mind. Turbodriver may not have access to that information and the 400K figure likely includes some of the same users playing more than once per day. Horny doesn't sleep, you know. In a Patreon post from December, Turbodriver says that the number of Wicked Whims players has been growing every year alongside The Sims 4's main playerbase.
I'm attempting to convert apples to oranges here, but looking at the concurrent players (not daily unique users) for the top games on Steam via Steam.db versus the 400,000 daily launches (also not daily unique users) for Wicked Whims, it seems like the number of folks playing just Wicked Whims (versus unmodded The Sims 4) could hold its own in the consistent top 10 games being played at any time on Steam.
It's tough to dismiss Wicked Whims as a niche mod for horn dogs when you see that kind of number. It's come by that smutty reputation fairly—the top line feature is "fully animated and interactive sex"—but you're more likely to hear Sims fans online praising it for realistically depicting fertility and menstruation or the nuanced attraction system that they prefer over what was added in the official Lovestruck expansion.
As for what he's working on adding to Wicked Whims next, aside from the less sexy bug fixing and code library improvements he also detailed in the December post, Turbodriver gave Taz one little spoiler: a new camgirl profession. It really is all work and no play around here in sex mods land.
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