The original poster is long gone, and now this is just the same old preaching to the very small choir here. And it does not change anything. And never will.

Because they're speculation about an expansion packs for horses, when horses were one of many pets features (and 3 major pets) in The Sims 3 pets.

Maxis, EA and other companies don't have "minions." Social media influencers have so much power and influence that they have 5X the leverage as the longtime loyal customer. I'm not trying to paint Maxis or EA as the victims here or trying to exonerate them. Just trying to make a point that the reasons for why they're doing what they're doing is more complex than people are making it out to be. They're part of a larger ecosystem, created by Big Tech, that is skewing Big Business's way of thinking.

Case in point--my family used to buy Sriraracha for a long time before it became a "thing." I don't remember what the numbers were, but I think that back then, the company was only pulling in a few million sales a year. When the hipsters discovered it and turned it into a huge social media fad, the company started pulling in billions in sales. Mind you, the sales weren't because the people buying it necessarily liked it. They were buying this stuff out of curiosity, as bragging rights, in the hopes of using it to become influencers themselves or even to flip and sell on eBay. Thrown into the mix were the multi-million and multi-billion dollar fast food chains and foodmakers buying the stuff to make sriracha-flavored chips, crackers, sandwiches, etc.

Fast forward years later, and Sriracha tastes nothing like it used to be, because the company catered to the social media influencers, their followers and the bandwagon jumpers, as opposed to the original customers. In that case, would it be Sriracha listening to "their minions", or just the plain cold fact that social media influencers, their followers and the customers they pulled in outnumber the original customers 30:1?

This is what's happening across the board in every sector and industry, including gaming, including everything else. Influencers are driving how developers do business. What gamers have to do is to get out of this groove of raging at developers, step back, look at the bigger picture and start lobbying against influencers, as well as help break up Big Tech.

Think about it--if there was no longer a bustling "influencer" scene on YouTube and social media, EA and Maxis would have no choice but to interact with actual players again and take paying customers more seriously.



Not to get sidetracked, but Amazon has never made a dime from its online store. In fact, it has been losing billions since the day it launched, to where businesses that are actually turning a profit couldn't compete with it and were forced to shut down. The real reason why it makes "billions" is its cloud computing service, AWS; its acquisitions (remember, Amazon owns Twitch, the IMDB, Dpreview, Whole Foods, etc.; the tax loopholes it exploited; and the sweetheart deals it was given. In fact, there are now signs that Amazon is beginning to implode. Don't be surprised if you see it start to collapse next year and become a shadow of its former self.

Yeah, there were 8 expansion packs and somewhat of a similar number of stuff packs. Now do the counting how many packs in TOTAL the sims 4 has, how much content is diced into said packs, how MUCH you get for the PRICE, compare the two games (Ts2 and TS4) in sump price sense, and what the TOTAL cost of full (or even on DISCOUNT) PRICE you have to PAY to get the same amount of content and quality you got from TS2 and TS3. You can't be serious and compare "TS2 was a HELL Lot" and be this out of loop and misinform people, when you haven't check the list of CONTENT PACK ts4 has by checking the wiki page (just google the capitalized words) then do the simple math of adding costs from both games.


Answer: TS4 has a whooping EIGHTEEN stuff packs and TWENTY THREE kits. On top of 13 and 12 expansions and game packs respectively, say hypothetically, you would all of the advertised virtual content from.what you're getting. You don't have mathetician, but would rather get TS2 with all of its EPS AND STUFFS, or TS4 to get all of that eye candy from one complete purchase?

Also, it's difficult to answer to the question that there's so much to mention of reasons why TS4 gets so much hate, as there loads of controversies surrounding the history that I can't track and remember all of it in one thread. But those who have been on the internet and kept in touch with the community and surrounding news, production, pr and development of TS4 will give you strong and valid points as this why ppl do find that EA and Maxis is slowly killing this game. @JesseMichaels19

I can't tell if you're being serious or not, but for a company that isn't making money, their fiscal history tells a interesting story.



If we do simple math, for a company that isn't making money, there is a $281 billion difference between 2018 to 2022 that's in their favor. If Amazon disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn't hurt my feelings. I don't shop with them, they treat customers like crap, ect. They do all the things EA does.

https://www.marketwatch.com/investi...od=mw_quote_tab

I'm going to repeat what I said before, since apparently what I said was ignored.

Amazon, the company, is not the store. It is its cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services. Almost everything that we do online is powered by AWS. That's how Jeff Bezos made his billions. Almost every company and website in the world uses AWS.

Amazon, the store, never made money. It's been selling at a loss the entire time. The reason is that Bezos never intended for the actual store to work. What he was trying to do was build up the store as a brand, then pool enough money to get other stores on board his whole cashless retail concept.

I didn't find anything particularly earthshattering about the link and screenshot you posted, because more interesting is the fact that Amazon decided to shut down, Digital Preview (or DPreview) this year, the biggest authority site on camera gear. That Amazon couldn't afford to keep it speaks volumes. Like I said in my previous post, Amazon is going to collapse/become a shadow of its former self next year (along with the rest of Big Tech) and start shutting down key features or selling off acquisitions. I know this, because everything that's happening right now is a repeat of the Dot Com Bubble of 1999. Amazon, Reddit, Twitch and all the rest will collapse or shrink. Twitter will be the first, and then the rest will go under.

That is on purpose. Amazon store spends what they earn to buy more assets. Used for expansion to increase market share. This also avoids declaring profits. But look up what they paid out to stockholders.

Anyway, just looking at net income is not a good way to assess whether a big company makes money. For that you could look at free cash flow and cash flow statement.

Big companies do all kinds of things to increase market share; laying people off is a big one. It's all smoke and mirrors, the rise in stock price from doing this is always temporary. EA's stock has been stuck between 113-120-ish for a long time. It has only risen recently because they've signed on with another cash cow called PepsiCo so they [EA] can promote junk food and other Pepsi products to children. It's tiring working those loot boxes and macrotransactions in FIFA doncha know.

The statement was made that Amazon has been losing billions, so I looked it up. There was no need to get into the weeds about it. A simple statement that asked for a simple response. Then I was accused of ignoring what was said, so I made that happen as well, because seriously. Clearly the conversation wasn't being ignored if I went in search of information about it. The conversation wasn't like the TS4 budget conversation where bold statements are made regularly that EA/ Maxis makes billions per fiscal quarter from TS4. Don't dare ask for receipts for that because then you're a {fill in the blank} because how dare people have receipts for anything. If somebody posted something on the internet, it must be true.

You are confusing me. I have no clue why you are acting like this towards me. I didn't accuse you of anything.

I don't like EA either for many of the reasons that you already posted about. I just don't care about it enough beyond whatever they do with the sims franchise. Except maybe the predatory monetization tactics towards underage children. But that is something I can't do anything about, only governments can through market regulation.

My comment was just about the net losses statement and how that it is not the complete picture. I was not attacking you.

There's nothing simple about what I said, except to those who don't understand that large corporations like Amazon have never had one revenue stream but will have as many as a dozen, and that the one thing they're most well known for is sometimes their biggest money loser. For example, Disney started losing tons of money on its movies right after WW2, so branched out into real estate, hotels, theme parks, music, kid's toys and television.

It's the same thing with Amazon. Amazon doesn't make money from its online store, because the intention was never to make it work but to build a brand in retail, and then get retail hooked into its AWS ecosystem. It makes money from AWS and its acquisitions.

Bringing this whole discussion back full circle, if companies like EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, etc. are doing everyone dirty, it's pointless to attack these companies when the larger problem is that Big Tech's business model is either influencing or having a negative impact on how everyone else does business. So, gamers and consumers in general have to have greater awareness of this problem rather than default to the "X is Evil/Kill It with Fire" response. We all have to be more proactive in figuring things out and coming up with solutions than creating bogeymen out of companies.