Landlords will just steal your stuff if you don't pay rent in The Sims 4: For Rent expansion

Maxis showed off a new gameplay trailer for the upcoming Sims 4: For Rent expansion and somehow the vision of evil landlordship just keeps getting more dire. We'd already found out that the new expansion would add "eviction anxiety," burglary, and neglectful landlords, but it looks like you can be even more actively evil than that.

Presumably you can be a property owner who has some concept of decency, but The Sims 4 is really set on showing off the horrors of renting. I think they accurately clocked the player base on this one⁠—Live Mode people are fiends. So for those of you who love to sew chaos and misery, rest assured you'll have so many ways to do so. In the new trailer, Maxis shows:

  • Posting a rent demand for past-due payments
  • Threatening eviction
  • Bug infestations
  • Malicious ghosts?
  • Tenant revolts
  • Stealing your tenants' stuff

Seriously, one Sim just pulls out a giant laser and inter-dimensionally repos some fancy-looking vase from a tenant's home. And I thought rent hikes and eviction threats are bad. There are all sorts of juicy Sims storytelling opportunities in all this, but I'll sure be too scared to test any of them.

(Image credit: Maxis, Electronic Arts)

Elsewhere in the trailer, Maxis also explains how denoting each unit in a lot works, which looks like a very handy system. Specifying which rooms belong to which unit and which are common spaces looks simple enough, and that's the part I'll personally be playing with most.

The Sims 4: For Rent launches on December 7 for the usual expansion price of $40. 

Lauren Morton
Associate Editor

Lauren started writing for PC Gamer as a freelancer in 2017 while chasing the Dark Souls fashion police and accepted her role as Associate Editor in 2021, now serving as the self-appointed chief cozy games enjoyer. She originally started her career in game development and is still fascinated by how games tick in the modding and speedrunning scenes. She likes long books, longer RPGs, has strong feelings about farmlife sims, and can't stop playing co-op crafting games.