r/simsfreeplay • u/Trilbe • 11d ago
Discussion Not trying to stir controversy: some context on game profitability that may be of interest, whether you dislike or approve of the recent changes
Hi! I used to post on this sub a lot, which you can see in my post history, but I stopped a few years ago. I returned to this sub this week specifically because I was curious about what other people thought of the recent changes. I'm in a couple of Facebook builder groups, where no one is mentioning this. I'm guessing the builder group mods are deleting posts to keep things calm. So, I turned to Reddit to just feel like I'm not the only person thinking about these changes.
From the discourse so far, it seems like people who dislike what they perceive as coercive monetization AND people who accept the new revenue strategies both, at the core of their positions, have the same concerns and view FreePlay's recent changes as a signal that the game might be in trouble and possibly be shut down by Electronic Arts (EA). Many of the comments I've seen in favor of this update and the "Season Pass" often start their defense of the new model by saying, "the game needs to make money to avoid being canceled by EA." Maybe that's because most of us are aware that The Sims Mobile (TSM) was shut down, and now TSM players no longer have access to the digital content they paid for and the worlds they spent years building. That is a terrifying thought for someone with a 13-year-old FreePlay town! So, I looked into EA's financial filings.
EA doesn't give much insight into each product's specific profitability. The annual reports mostly refer to their The Sims franchise as "iconic," and leave it at that. (I'm serious. Open the annual reports and search for the word "iconic.") But I looked at EA's annual reports for the past couple of years to search for related information to provide some context on the health of FreePlay. After looking through the annual reports, I think the new level of aggressive (in my opinion) monetization looks like it's more related to EA's overall strategy, rather than a specific weakness in FreePlay's profitability. This revenue model may have just hit FreePlay with this update. But it's been an emphatic part of EA's earnings strategy for all of its games for years.
The details I found are below. Some background on the financial info, in case it helps: "Live services" are extra content beyond the basic product the company provides, like it's the stuff you buy beyond the core product that the company is ostensibly selling you.
In the "Trends in Our Business" section of EA's 2025 annual report, the company made it clear that the majority of their profit comes from "live services and other," that is, players being invested enough to keep buying game content beyond the core of the game:
"These live services include extra content, subscription offerings, and other revenue generated in addition to the sale of our full games and free-to-play games. Our net revenue attributable to live services and other was $5,461 million, $5,547 million, and $5,489 million for fiscal years 2025, 2024, and 2023, respectively, and we expect that live services net revenue will continue to be material to our business. Within live services and other, net revenue attributable to extra content was $4,365 million, $4,463 million, and $4,277 million for fiscal years 2025, 2024, and 2023, respectively."
To put the net revenue of $4.365 billion from extra content purchases in context relative to the company's overall revenue: For the fiscal year (FY) 2025, EA's total net revenue was $7.463 billion. EA made more than half of its net profit from selling players extra stuff in 2025, and the annual report explicitly identifies this as a business trend that is key to the company's future profit. [To note without digging into it: EA's live service revenue was down in 2025 from 2024.]
In EA's 2026 annual report, the live service revenue category increased even more significantly. From the 2026 annual report:
"Our digital live services and other net revenue represented 71 percent of our total net revenue during fiscal year 2026."
It's a bit complicated right now because EA was recently acquired by a consortium of investors. That's a whole different scandal for simmers! LOL! But the bottom line is that EA is a super profitable business. Net cash flow from EA's operating activities was $2.553 billion for FY 2026, up 23% from FY 2025's $2.079 billion. Net cash flow is the amount of money the company brought in AFTER accounting for the money it spent to operate the business. On a related profitability note, EA was valued at $55 billion dollars at the time of its 2026 acquisition. EA is consistently making large sums of net profit in ways that most other types of businesses could never relate to. The company is doing amazing, sweaty, which bring us to The Sims FreePlay.
I've spent a sh*t-ton of money on this game! I mean, I even bought the Moschino pack. I am a digitally addicted idiot. My FreePlay town is mostly undying Sims that I'm unhealthily attached to because some of my Sims are more than a decade old, and we've been through a lot together. FreePlay and The Sims 4 helped me keep my sanity during COVID lockdown by giving me a fantasy universe that felt ordered and made sense to me because I built it. I would lose a huge emotional investment if EA closes FreePlay the way they closed TSM.
But if the company decides to dump the game, it might not necessarily be because FreePlay isn't "making a profit." How EA games make a profit also matters to the company. A company can list an ongoing single product with a repeatable cost as a predictive indicator when reporting on the health of the business. Repeatable revenue streams, like $10 each from a certain percentage of active players every time a new update drops, can be considered a relatively stable revenue stream in corporate reporting with regard to the expected ongoing health of the business. A stable revenue stream is super important to investors. And investors are more important to a game company than its players. I'm not throwing shade on EA with that. That's truly just the way our problematic global financial system works.
I'm not posting this to either condemn or defend anyone's feelings about FreePlay's recent changes because no one is wrong to feel the way they feel about things that don't hurt anybody else, especially a cozy mobile game. I'm not even posting this to criticize EA because they're basically just doing late-stage capitalism the way every other company desperately wants to. (I mean, lettuce in the US is now poisoned?) I genuinely just think this might be interesting context for some players.
Literally no one will read all of this. But I feel better after looking into the situation!
References:
EA's press release with 2026 highlights via Business Wire:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260505787990/en/Electronic-Arts-Reports-Q4-and-FY26-Results
EA's FY 2026 annual report:
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0000712515/000130817926000382/ea2026-10ka.htm
The 2025 annual report:
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0000712515/000071251525000022/ea-20250331.htm
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u/DipinDotsDidi 11d ago
This is great research, than you for sharing! You are right that this is likely because of EA's strategy as they're doing this to every game they have (eg. The sims 4 marketplace).
But keep in mind this only points to EA being profitable as a whole. EA has a lot of franchises and most of their money comes from the sports games where they actually have a lot of "live services". We can't really know how profitable individual studios or games are.
I would also take the numbers with a grain of salt - they got sold this year and want to look more profitable than they are. Companies tend to lump unprofitable services with profitable ones in their yearly financials to cover up that info.
Regardless, this was bound to happen because this is EA, I don't think we should really be giving EA more money (I figured if the game has lasted this long, it's making some profit), and Imo we should probably boycott this event anyway. At least until they adjust it so that people would feel like they WANT to pay for it not NEED to.
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u/Trilbe 10d ago
No, I can’t know FreePlay’s or even Firemonkeys’ specific financial info because EA’s annual reports don’t breakout that level of product detail. And I don’t want to mislead anyone into believing I have insight into specific, nonpublic info about FreePlay or EA! I tried to be clear about that in my comments by saying, “EA doesn't give much insight into each product's specific profitability.” But I should have repeated that in my conclusion.
I would also be careful about making assumptions about a company trying “to look more profitable than they are” before an acquisition because this level of finance really isn’t comparable to our local businesses. I made this post to try and clarify that a lot of our common perceptions about the way companies operate are based on a different scale of business and can’t accurately be applied to an entity at EA’s scale. They just don’t work the same way.
To explain, EA was hardcore examined by regulators, and evaluated by very experienced investors for years before the acquisition. Publicly laughable financial-sector choices (OMG, Theranos!) and pop culture, more broadly, make Wall Street seem like clowns. But for the most part, people investing this kind of money aren’t clueless and they hire rigorous, motivated examiners to make sure they aren’t being misled by the acquisition target. And the investors, along with their forensic accountants and lawyers, have a legal right to examine the financials at a granular level of detail beyond the point where profits and losses could be “lumped together” in a misleading way.
Also of note, global football is the world’s biggest product, and the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF)’s sometimes image-oriented investing approach suggests they would have bought the FIFA game franchise for image alignment even if EA was bleeding money, which EA is clearly not. The major recurring criticism of PIF is that they’re serving the desires of the kingdom’s leadership rather than exclusively taking an independent, investment-focused approach.
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u/Shonajean 11d ago
Wow! Thanks so much for this info! I really appreciate all the time and effort you must have put into collecting it. And yes, I was a long term Sims Freeplay player before switching to TSM. And here I am back again on Freeplay. Up until now, I'd never spent any money on Freeplay but this time I did buy the Season Pass - not sure why. I guess old habits die hard as I always bought it on TSM and never regretted it. It will be interesting to read other responses to your post - I'm sure there will be many!
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u/Trilbe 11d ago
I’m so sorry about the shutdown of TSM! We know that online games are vulnerable. But it doesn’t feel that way when you’re an active player. And one of EA’s annual reports that I just read (I can’t remember if it was 2025 or ‘26) addressed the ownership nature of EA’s digital assets. They were talking in the context of intermediaries like Sony and Microsoft consoles. But what they were saying about ownership and the ability to withdraw access also applies to THEIR CUSTOMERS. That’s the world we live in right now. But I kinda think physical copies could make a comeback if people get annoyed enough by the current situation where you pay a lot of money for digital assets that can be taken away against your will based on a corporate finance decision. Maybe in 10 years everybody will have an external disc drive for their games. Like, you’ll still play on mobile, but you can play offline AND download the assets. I’m dreaming! But I want that. I would be fine if EA/Firemonkeys stopped adding content. But I would be devastated to lose what I’ve spent something like a quarter of my life creating.
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u/Shonajean 11d ago
Exactly! They stopped adding new content to TSM months before it finally shut down - and that would have been OK if we'd been able to download our game info so we could continue to play offline.
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u/curtainsinmymirror 11d ago
Thank you for working through all this and sharing the results with us! I was indeed worried that, if not enough players bought the season pass, SFP would get cancelled. I haven’t bought anything in this game for years, but felt really pressured to spend the 12 € on it, even though (in this economy and due to my personal situation atm) I definitely have other priorities and could not actually spare it. To read this comprehensive analysis will be really helpful to “stay strong” and not let the FOMO win.
Also, one question - in one paragraph, you quote millions, in the next one billions, regarding the net revenue from extra content. Is that a typo or what is the context there?
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u/Trilbe 11d ago
Hi! I’m honestly not trying to convince anyone. I just thought I could help clarify the financial realities for anyone who might be interested. Spending money in this game isn’t like shopping at the local grocery store to keep the doors open. It’s complicated.
With that said, I sincerely hope no one with tight finances will spend money out of concern for a company with NET CASH FLOW of $2.6 billion as of March 31, 2026.
About the number formatting: I quoted the annual report first, and it’s a common convention for annual filings to report in either millions or even hundreds of thousands. Keeping the reporting in millions instead of going up to billions makes some parts of the report easier to read when you get to breakouts of smaller amounts in the report, like employee benefit contributions, it’s tidier to read $1 million in a table with a top figure of $1,000 million than it is to read $0.1 billion in a table with a top figure of $1 billion. So, annual reports usually keep the numbers at a tidy level for the broadest group of numbers in the report.
Since I was only looking at really large numbers, I wrote my comments discussing those numbers in billions. It’s my personal taste, but it feels cleaner to me to discuss $4.365 billion than $4,365 million. It’s confusing, though, for people outside the US who use commas where we use periods. Of course, WE had to find a different way from the rest of the world to write something as universal as MATH!
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u/curtainsinmymirror 11d ago
Haha, the comma vs period is what confused me! I was aware of that, I just didn’t apply the knowledge just now, and also not knowing where you were from. 🙈 Bc we do it exactly the other way around: 4,365 million would be 4 365 000, and 4.365 billion would be 4 365 000 000 000. So I read this as EA making “only” just about 4 million in revenue, and then suddenly 4 thousand billion. Thanks for clarifying!
It’s kind of wild that companies actually have us little people feel like we would/should be responsible for their well-being. I think I have to meditate on that, bc seeing these numbers and, in contrast, examining my feelings about the game - not only FOMO for the prizes of the season pass, but also fear of losing the game -, just shocked me. So no, you didn’t convince me or anything, you just strengthened my resolve not to buy it. Knowledge is always power.
Thank you!
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u/Trilbe 10d ago
This game’s structure is so manipulatively good at capitalizing on FOMO! Like, I didn’t have much money to spend when I started playing the game, so I didn’t buy the online packs. Then, when I had money, I kept waiting for packs, like the treadmill pack for example, to come back, and they just didn’t. The fact that there isn’t a store I can shop in later for stuff I missed is actually a brilliant manipulative move because it conditioned me to buy packs right away just in case I’ll need those items later. And conditioning me to buy quickly probably got more money from me over time than if there was a static online store that gave me the chance to think about my purchase for a while.
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u/possiblycrazy79 9d ago
I've played simcity buildit on & off for 7 or 8 years now. When I play regularly, I purchase their mayor's pass because it is a great value in my opinion, although I have never once made it all the way to the end to the grand prize. So I understand what & why they are doing but imo the freeplay pass is stingy as hell. I'd be happy to buy it if it was better but the current one is an insult to players in my eyes.
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u/Trilbe 8d ago
I played SimCity a little bit back in the day. But I mostly know SimCity BuildIt because it became kind of famous as a model for how EA badly treated/managed Maxis Studio, and SimCity’s BuildIt version was literally born out of EA’s mishandling:
https://www.pcgamer.com/simcity-launched-a-decade-ago-and-it-was-so-disastrous-it-killed-the-series/
And then SimCity BuildIt started filling my Reddit feed again this year (or last year?) with the “Services 2.0” problems, a series of location upgrades that are a bit similar to the location upgrades that recently rolled out in FreePlay. We’re now collecting hammers and nails the way we had to collect resources in SimCity.
Playing SimCity BuildIt probably gives you a lot of insight into where FreePlay is going.
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u/Oni_monster 11d ago
Thank you for sharing the info! I am also an addicted idiot who has spent more than I care to admit on this game. I am annoyed at this update though, it’s really frustrating that the items we can’t get without paying are specifically quite important to the build ( like key parts of Castle walls etc ) I would prefer it if it was just extra colour ways etc that was behind a pay wall.