The Sims Mobile

» see ea.com/games/the-sims/the-sims-mobile as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the sims mobile's eight years overlap almost perfectly with my smartphone-as-default years. i was 34 when it shipped in 2018 and 42 when ea pulled the plug. by then the phone in my pocket had been a galaxy of some flavor for the whole period. but i did not play the sims on it.

the sims as a desktop franchise sat outside my taste even in the 2000s. i remember friends at university running the original sims and then sims 2 on machines that could barely afford the load. you build a house, you watch a tiny person fail to clean their kitchen. that part i understood as a concept. the mobile version added what every 2018 mobile game added. an energy bar that refilled in real time. a soft currency you could buy with money. that loop has its audience and i was not in it.

the sims mobile launched 6 march 2018 worldwide, after months of soft launch in brazil. maxis built it, with help from firemonkeys in melbourne. by 2019 the studio handoff began. firemonkeys took the wheel for about a year, then slingshot inherited it for the long sunset that ran from 2020 until shutdown. the credits on the splash screen kept getting shorter.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it earned ~

the monetization was the whole shape of the product. simcash sat in a small pink bar at the top of the screen. you needed it to skip waits, to unlock a piece of furniture, to push an event toward its better outcome. you could grind for it. or you could pay. the cheapest simcash pack was three dollars. the largest was a hundred. ea's first seven months pulled between fifteen and twenty-five million dollars from this loop, which sounds like a hit until you compare it to the cost of running a live-service team on a sims-grade ip year after year.

metacritic landed it at 73. reviews praised the polish (the art held up, the sims animations were faithful) and panned the timers. the same loop that pulled in fifteen million dollars in seven months also chased away the players who would have been around for year six.

~ the long sunset ~

ea posted the first warning on 29 january 2024. no new events, no new content, only reruns of older seasonal stuff. for almost two years the game ran on past material like a tv channel between contracts. the in-app shop stayed open and the simcash kept selling. the active dev team was already on something else.

the delisting came on 21 october 2025. you could no longer download a fresh copy from the app store after that date. existing installs still worked, existing purchases still functioned. servers were given until 20 january 2026. on that morning the matchmaking layer went dark and the houses your sims lived in stopped saving.

~ what got buried with it ~

a sims save is a story. it is the family you raised plus the house you decorated over three years of plane rides and bus seats, tied to a server somewhere in dublin. ea did not give a way to export it. when the lights went out, the saves went with them.

this is the second sims grave on this site. the sims online died in 2008 after five years. the sims mobile died in 2026 after eight. both shut down for the same reason underneath. the desktop sims keeps shipping because you can sell the disc once and stop. live-service sims is a contract you have to renew with the entire userbase every quarter, and eventually one quarter the math does not work.

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