I’m wondering what sales of the Sims 3 are really going to look like. Sure it’s more visually appealing than the Sims 2 and from what I can tell the character development and game interaction is more involved but who’s really going to  buy it? Most of the people I know who bought the Sims 2 weren’t actually playing the game but using it for filming.  Conceptually there isn’t a whole that that seems to have changed from the Sims 2. Fights are still “cartoonish”, most of the intimacy has the a majority of maturity removed, and we’re going to be back to square one as far as modding the Sims 3 goes. While it won’t take long for cheats and hacked object to show up it will still be a while before was have pictures that allow us to force the characters to interact in desginated ways.

When I first played the Sims (original) I played the game, but the Sims 2 was leaps and bounds ahead of the Original Sims so I bought it to play and accidently felling to Machinima wich only boosted sales for the game. But again, I don’t really know anyone who “plays” the game at this point. Even my own need to purchase expansions were not for the game itself but for the varous locations and objects I wanted to use for filming. Those that are doing movies have already expressed they don’t want to convert over as no one would want to rebuild everything for a series they are in the middle of.

Personally I think Lionhead should get off it’s laurels and make a “the Movies 2″ but with better technology. Or sell the whole concept to EA Games. Can you imagine characters that look like 3rd Gen Sims in a game like “The Movies”? Not only would these movies be better looking (one of the things that killed the game in the first place) but they wouldn’t be as static (fixed camera angle and limited interactions is another thing that killed the game). Lionhead has always been  one of those companies that had good ideas they could never execute. When I first bought my copy of “The Movies” it was always locking up and crashing my system. I spent months going back and forth with Tech Support only to get “We cannot determine what would be causing this issue” and then they basically told me to stop bothering them. I don’t think I’ve bought another product from them again… so I guess a sequal to “The Movies” would have to produced by another company before I’d buy it anyway.