The Sims 4
In the life sim The Sims 4 you create Sims, build them a home and watch how they live. The fourth game added emotions, and Sims learned to do several things at once.
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At first Maxis was betting on online play. It dropped the idea after the poor launch of 2013's SimCity, which demanded a constant connection.
Before release the studio announced that the game would ship without pools and without toddlers. It blamed time and technical hurdles, and players were furious. Pools came back in a free update in November 2014, toddlers only in January 2017.
That is how the game kept growing, through updates and paid packs. In October 2022 the base game was made free, and by 2024 more than 85 million people had played The Sims 4.
At launch critics praised the look, the smarter Sims and the streamlined building, but faulted the missing content from earlier games, frequent loading screens and bugs. Players leave 86% positive out of 202,323 reviews; critics give it 70 on Metacritic. By our Recommended Score it is #2,432 of 4,736 games.
Liked it? Try The Sims 3, where the whole town is open to wander, and inZOI, a life sim from South Korea's KRAFTON with realistic Unreal Engine 5 graphics.
Major updates
The Sims™ 4 Lady Bridgerton’s Masquerade Ball Bundle · May 2026All 5
System requirements
Minimum GeForce 6600 · 4 GB RAM · 26 GBiSteam Deck PlayableMin & recommended
| Minimum | Recommended | |
|---|---|---|
| OS | 64 Bit Required. Windows 10 | 64 Bit Windows 10 |
| Processor | 3.3 GHz Intel Core i3-3220 (2 cores, 4 threads), AMD Ryzen 3 1200 3.1 GHz (4 cores) or better | Intel core i5 (4 cores), AMD Ryzen 5 or better |
| Memory | 4 GB | 8 GB |
| Graphics | 128 MB of Video RAM and support for Pixel Shader 3.0. Supported Video Cards: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 or better, ATI Radeon X1300 or better, Intel GMA X4500 or better | 1 GB of Video RAM, NVIDIA GTX 650, AMD Radeon HD 7750, or better |
| DirectX | 11 | 11 |
| Storage | 26 GB | 51 GB |
From the game’s Steam store page.
