Countless hours, days—perhaps even weeks—of my life have been spent creating Sims characters, building them houses, marrying them off, and making babies. Now, there’s a new life-simulation game on the block hoping to expand beyond the American market.
inZOI debuted on March 28 at $40 and quickly climbed to the top of Steam’s most wishlisted and bestseller charts. The game’s appeal lies in its hyper-detailed character customization, free expansions, and immersive, realism-focused world. Unlike The Sims, which embraces cartoonish characters and lightheartedness, inZOI opts for lifelike graphics and a slower-paced gameplay experience centered on everyday interactions.
Designed with a broader audience in mind, inZOI stands out through subtle cultural details. For example, players’ digital humans are prompted to remove their shoes upon entering a home, and the game’s cities draw inspiration from Seoul and Santa Monica. The fridge is stocked with tteokbokki, a beloved Korean rice cake snack, and characters often wear trendy Korean streetwear.
“I felt a lot of cultural barriers” playing The Sims, Hyungjun “Kjun” Kim, chief executive officer of game publisher Krafton’s inZOI Studio, told Bloomberg in a recent interview. Kim spent years developing online role-playing games, only to come home and play The Sims with his son. One day, his son asked why there aren’t other games like The Sims. That question stuck with Kim and eventually led to the creation of inZOI.
Once the prototype was ready, Krafton sought input from The Sims’ large and dedicated fanbase. They sent PCs to Sims YouTubers, encouraging them to livestream the game, while fans joined a Discord channel to request features they felt The Sims was lacking—such as more inclusive hairstyles.
The Sims franchise has been a cash cow for Electronic Arts, generating over $5 billion in revenue and attracting more than 15 million new players in 2024, despite being more than a decade old. But with no Sims 5 in sight, EA has relied on expansion packs to keep players engaged, opening up a gap in the market that inZOI is eager to fill.
Still, if inZOI was banking on its competitor fading into obscurity, it may be disappointed. The Sims 4 recently hit its highest-ever average player count on Steam in February 2025, according to The Gamer. The anticipation surrounding inZOI perhaps sparked a wave of players to revisit their old favorite. Either way, The Sims franchise has shown it still has plenty of life in it.
Zaloguj się, aby dodać komentarz
Inne posty w tej grupie
Every now and then, you run into a tool that truly wows you.
It’s rare—especially nowadays, when everyone and their cousin is coming out with overhyped AI-centric codswallop tha
Tesla released its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday, its first since the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, took up residence in the Trump White House and immediately began trying to fire f
There’s never a dull day in the world of weight-loss medication. This week brought new restrictions on compounded GLP-1 medication, the cheaper, copycat versions of brand-name drugs that tel
In December 2023, I wrote an article exploring Apple CEO Tim Cook’s most likely successors, because t
“Meta profits, kids pay the price,” was the message delivered by dozens of grieving families at the doors of Meta’s Manhattan office on Thursday.
Forty-five families traveled from
The world’s auto industry is getting a shake-up from Chinese automakers that
There’s Blue Sky and then there’s Bluesky.
Blue Sky, a paper goods company
