The Sims 4 (and its developers at Electronic Arts and Maxis) have come under fire recently for adding microtransactions and paid mods to the game, Bethesda Creation Club-style, with a new feature called The Sims 4 Marketplace. Naturally, players are unhappy that a game with over 100 DLC packs (that can cost you $1,600) is implementing more monetization tactics, but the problems with The Sims 4 Marketplace go deeper than player frustration with what they perceive as EA’s greed.
To get a better idea of what exactly is going on in The Sims 4, I decided to take its new player-creation marketplace for a spin, and what I found was disappointing, but not surprising. Perhaps the first thing to note is that EA has now implemented a premium in-game currency, called Moola, which players must purchase before they can buy Maker Marketplace items. And it turns out, the Maker Marketplace is everything Sims 4 players don’t want in a game update, but it’s far from the first time EA has plugged its ears and yelled “I can’t hear you!” in response to Sims players’ complaints.
To understand how the game ended up here, we’ll have to travel back to early 2025. It’s been a strange year for The Sims, and the game’s path to a paid mod marketplace has been a bumpy one. The franchise celebrated its 25th anniversary in February 2025, which EA and Maxis marked with multiple Sims 4 content creator collaborations, promises to fix game-breaking bugs that had gone ignored for years, and of course, the announcement of even more paid DLC. Naturally, players were excited to see long-standing bugs addressed, and were happy with new base game updates that fleshed out Sims’ personalities and romantic aspirations, along with DLC packs that introduced romantic new locales and even new ways for Sims to kick the bucket.
All was well (relatively speaking) until October 2025, when members of EA’s Sims Creator Network–including massively popular creators like Kayla “LilSimsie” Simms–left the program en masse in the wake of the announcement that EA was being sold to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, and controversial investment firm Silver Lake.
For years, EA had depended heavily on its content creators to promote its expansion packs, even collaborating with LilSimsie for a pack themed entirely around her preferred aesthetic. With nearly every one its biggest The Sims 4 creators gone, EA formulated a simple solution: Find new ones. Earlier this month, the publisher put out a public call for new content creators for its player-made content marketplace, which has apparently been in the works for at least a year.
“The Sims Marketplace Maker Program is now open for applications!” the official Sims 4 account posted on X. “Learn more and apply today!”
The backlash was instant. Players were already disillusioned with the game’s recently implemented login rewards and limited-time events, which offered players underwhelming in-game items (and which were swiftly duplicated for free by modders). EA hid multiple critical replies to its announcement tweet, and didn’t address comments from a creator who had recently left the Marketplace Maker Program claiming EA was unclear about the terms and used promises of a steady income to financially manipulate smaller creators into joining or staying.
Then came the truth: Members of EA’s Marketplace Maker Program can set their own prices, but they only get 30% of the money from each purchase of their creations, while EA takes home 70%.
This incentivizes creators to cram more content into their Marketplace offerings, and charge as little for them as possible. As a result, Custom Content (CC) packs for sale on the Maker Marketplace are rarely priced at more than 500 Moola ($5 USD), and their biggest selling point–something mentioned in nearly every listing I came across–is color swatches.
In The Sims 3, players could use a color wheel in both Create-A-Sim (CAS) and Build/Buy Mode to customize Sims’ hair, eyes, clothing, furniture, and decor. This made matching outfits and creating the ideal living room a cinch. But because The Sims 4 was originally envisioned as an online MMO meant to be playable on mobile devices, EA did away with the color wheel and replaced it with a small number of color swatches for each item. To this day, Sims only have 24 hair color options, and have even fewer options for clothing colors. If you want pastel pink hair, too bad–the only option is magenta. If you want neon purple hair, your only option is lavender. If you want an all-black outfit, good luck–even swatches that are meant to be the same color often end up being noticeably different when applied to different pieces of clothing. EA has repeatedly stated that implementing a color wheel for Sim hair (let alone eyes, clothes, furniture, and decor) is simply impossible.
That’s a bit odd, given that EA easily implemented not only a color wheel but a custom painting mechanic for pet-Sims like cats, dogs, and horses (which the game’s code treats like regular, human Sims). If you want to create a literal rainbow unicorn in the Sims 4, you can easily do so. But if you want to tweak your Sim’s dye job slightly? Well, you’ll need a mod for that–or you’ll need to pay for a Maker Marketplace content pack of color swatches, assuming they add any. I handpainted this Lisa Frank-inspired cat in about 20 minutes using no custom content whatsoever, but according to EA, making my Sim’s hair the right shade of purple is a technical impossibility.
As I said before, the creator-made content in the Marketplace isn’t overly expensive. But unless you’re a console player, there is absolutely no reason to purchase it, because you can easily find equivalent CC items for free on sites like CurseForge, The Sims Resource, and even Tumblr. Many creators provide free CC and make their income via supporters on Patreon, which only takes a 5% to 12% cut of the money given to creators–a far better deal than the 70% EA’s taking from its Marketplace Makers. In the past, EA has even attempted to control what Sims modders can do on Patreon, changing The Sims 4 TOS in 2022 to seemingly prevent modders from providing early access to mods via Patreon, a policy they later walked back. In retrospect, it looks like EA was attempting to pre-emptively make it difficult for modders to profit from their work on Patreon, which would leave the Maker Marketplace–which has been in development for a while now, based on comments from former members–as the only option to earn an income from their mods.
Though the Maker Marketplace might seem enticing with its promise of greater exposure for creators, it’s clear that the program rips off creators just as much as players, and continues to give EA an excuse to avoid implementing a feature it previously offered while it charges players for that functionality.
Color swatches are easily the biggest selling point in the Maker Marketplace. Look, this collection of European-style electrical outlets only costs 200 Moola ($2) and has 10 color swatches! Nevermind the fact that a nearly identical set of outlets is available for free via The Sims Resource.
Why would I–or any other player–waste even more real-life cash on an already overpriced game that appears to see its largely female playerbase as nothing more than an endless supply of cash? The Maker Marketplace is an insult to players and creators alike. The only demographic who might benefit from the Maker Marketplace is the console playerbase, as console players cannot install mods or CC from the internet. But that doesn’t change the fact that EA is once again using predatory monetization tactics to try and wring more cash out of players who might have already shelled out for a game with over 100 DLCs, instead of implementing the one feature players have been begging for since day one: a color wheel that would allow for color customization in a game that has historically been all about player freedom and creativity.
On one level, the Maker Marketplace’s offerings are both underwhelming and overpriced–one Maker-made “Elevated Essentials” pack costs $5 and only includes “improved” versions of pre-existing clothing items originally created by EA. Paid mods have never and will never elicit a positive response from players (something both EA and Bethesda haven’t seemed to figure out yet). You can find better CC for free all over the internet, and you can support the creators of that CC directly via Patreon instead of handing EA a massive 70% cut of the profits for content it was too lazy and greedy to make in-house. If we dig in deeper, however, the way EA uses the marketplace to push content creators to add missing elements or features to the game, charges for them, and takes a big slice of the money, is ultimately predatory. Creators, players, and even The Sims 4 itself don’t feel like priorities for EA anymore; it’s clear their eyes are on something a whole lot greener.
