The Sims 4’s active player count grew by 35% last year

Over the past 19 years The Sims has cemented itself as one of the most iconic videogame series in the world. But even as the franchise closes in on its 20th birthday, it’s surprising just how well The Sims 4 – now nearly five years old in its own right – continues to sell.

In a recent earnings call (via SeekingAlpha) EA CEO Andrew Wilson revealed that The Sims 4’s player count “has grown every year since we launched.”

Thanks to the addition of three new content packs over the course of the last financial year (Seasons, Get Famous, and Strangerville, for those of you keeping score at home) Wilson says that there’s been a “35% year-over-year increase in active players and our strongest year of engagement yet for the game.” For a game that’s coming up on five years old, it seems it’s still making some pretty good progress.

Wilson didn’t reveal how many players that increase actually means, but his comments do reveal that there’s been a pretty decent step up when it comes to the number of people booting The Sims 4 up on a monthly basis. We do know that The Sims 4 gained five million new players in 2018, so the 2019 player numbers are likely to be pretty impressive.

Elsewhere in the earnings call, COO and CFO Blake Jorgensen revealed that EA has plenty of plans when it comes to The Sims over the next 12 months. He said that “we will add over 20 different content drops” to The Sims 4 between now and the end of the financial year.

Even if you – like me – fell off of The Sims some time before the release of the third game, you might be interested to learn that the series is still very successful and incredibly profitable. EA says that The Sims 4 has now brought in more than $1 billion over its lifetime, and it’s continuing to bring in new players even now, nearly half a decade after launch.