The Sims 4 officially announced, will allow offline play

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EA announced today that The Sims 4 , a follow-up to 2009's The Sims 3 and the latest in Maxis's long-running life-simulation series, will be coming to PC and Mac in 2014. The news broke on the company's The Beat blog , with more news promised later in the day.

The Sims franchise is one of the most commercially successful in all of gaming as it reaches out to casual gamers and the more hardcore crowd alike. The Sims 3 has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide and spawned a number of console and handheld spin-offs and numerous themed expansions.

As a fan of the series, I was relieved to hear that Sims 4 is going to include an option for offline play, as reported by IGN . After all of the problems experienced by gamers during the recent SimCity launch (including in our own Celebrity SimCity series ), I hope this signals a change of opinion from Maxis and parent company EA regarding always-online DRM and the stability of permanently server-based gameplay. It is of course far too early to tell for sure, but it's only Monday; I'm still allowed to be optimistic.

Ian Birnbaum
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