Ever got the feeling you are giving away your money rather than spending it for something in return? Well, I have. Where? Well..

Lately, EA has been sucking money out of die-hard Sim fans. All the expansions they have been releasing for The Sims 3 ARE NOT what fans have been asking, since the game actually came out, on their Facebook page and at the forums. Fans have been asking for Seasons, Pets and some of them the ability to open a business again..mostly because these expansion packs were a huge success back at The Sims 2; they were the 3 expansions that added more gameplay.

What are they getting? Useless expansion packs that tweak what came with The Sims 3. The Sims 3: Ambitions tweaked the job system by adding new jobs and the ability to choose what to do. The Sims 3: Generations added a few uninteresting and underdeveloped tweaks to each of the Sims stage of life. The Sims 3: Late Night added a new neighborhood, as well as the ability to go to deserted clubs and the ability to become a celebrity, not by what you do, but by who you know. The only expansion that created a new concept and added fresh gameplay was probably The Sims 3: World Adventures. It adds 3 whole new worlds and the ability to explore tombs, which is, quite amusing, though unrealistic. All the other expansions just tweak what was expected from a transition from The Sims 2 to The Sims 3.

Then, we have the stuff packs. EA thought they weren't getting enough money from the excruciatingly expensive sets they have at The Sims 3 Store, so they decided to put a few uninteresting objects on «a box» and call it a stuff pack.

Finally, after they ran out of expansion and stuff packs to suck people's money, they decided to release The Sims 3 Pets. In my opinion, they left this expansion for much later for 2 major reasons:

1 - They thought if they kept releasing expansions people don't really want, people would just buy them, if only to support the company into finally releasing the most demanded expansions.

2 - They know people LOVED The Sims 2: Pets and now have extremely high expectations for The Sims 3: Pets, so they were a little afraid to release this expansion.

In any case, they keep - and I will use the right word - robbing people's money. EA has seen that The Sims franchise is a pot of gold and have become greedier than ever.

The worst part of all of this, is that each time The Sims franchise takes a step (Sims->Sims 2->Sims 3->Sims 4) all the previous content given by expansions is lost and sometimes I wonder if being able to explore the town freely was reason enough to switch from The Sims 2 + over 15 expansions to The Sims 3.

EA could reward all the players by putting the sets in their store FREE but somehow, the store is also a source of great income for them. I don't understand how players are willing to pay 80$ for 80000 points which is not enough to buy 8 sets of objects. Thank god there are websites such as the sims resource and modthesims that have objects for The Sims 3 for FREE.

/Pip