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Adventure-focused life simulation from Maxis, with player-driven households, careers, and social choices. The Sims™ 4 was released in 2020 and published by Electronic Arts; on Steam it has 83,067 reviews with 86% positive, rated Very Positive.
Overview
The Sims™ 4 is a 2020 Adventure game developed by MAXIS and published by Electronic Arts. On Steam it has gathered 83,065 player reviews, 86% of them positive, which counts as a very positive reception among indie titles in the Adventure category. The game is available on windows, and is free to play. The pairing of developer MAXIS with publisher Electronic Arts is one of the studio-publisher relationships indielist tracks, letting players find comparable games and letting developers and investors study how Adventure projects reach the market. indielist's white-box method estimates its lifetime sales at roughly 4.2 million to 9.9 million units, with the full Boxleiter factor breakdown shown on this page rather than a single black-box figure. Within indielist's catalog of indie games mapped to their studios, publishers, and funding, The Sims™ 4 can be compared against similar Adventure titles and benchmarked on review counts and estimated sales.
Reviews
83,065
Positive
86%
Steam appid
1222670
Engine
Unknown
Sales estimate
vv1.04.2M to 9.9M
units (median: 7.1M)
≈ $36.3M to $84.7M net revenue (Steam cut + refunds + regional discount applied)
+ - How is this calculated?
| Factor | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| base | +50 |
| year_2020 | +15 |
| price_$15 | 0 |
| positive_86% | +10 |
| genre_Adventure | +10 |
| final NB | 85 |
Confidence range: median × [0.6, 1.4]. Boundary protection: NB ∈ [15, 150].
Methodology & limitations
Sales estimates use a multi-factor Boxleiter method against public Steam review counts.
They are not authoritative sales data. Actual sales can deviate by
±50% in either direction. Free-to-play games, deeply discounted titles, and games
with heavy bundle distribution have larger error margins. Algorithm version
v1.0.
indielist estimates lifetime unit sales for The Sims™ 4 at roughly 4.2 million to 9.9 million copies, with a median around 7.1 million, derived from its 83,065 Steam reviews using a multi-factor Boxleiter method (version v1.0). That median maps to approximately $60.5M in net revenue after Steam's 30% cut, regional pricing, and refunds. Unlike black-box trackers, the full calculation is shown on this page: a base review-to-sales multiplier is adjusted for release year, launch price, review sentiment, studio size, and genre, and every adjustment is listed so developers, publishers, and investors can audit exactly how the figure was reached. The range itself reflects genuine uncertainty — review-to-sales ratios vary widely between games — so indielist publishes a low, median, and high band rather than a false-precision single number, and treats free-to-play, heavily discounted, and bundle-distributed titles as having wider error margins still.
Price history
90d · low $13.21Over the last 90 days the price ranged from $13.21 to $19.99, averaging $19.28 across 2 discount windows, with a historical low of $13.21 on 2026-06-05.
Synthetic series for demo. Real ITAD price history loads after Day 3 ingest.
Platforms
windows
Genres
AdventureCasualSimulationFree To Play
Frequently asked questions
- How many copies has The Sims™ 4 sold?
- indielist estimates The Sims™ 4 has sold between 4,236,315 and 9,884,735 units (median 7,060,525), derived from its 83,065 Steam reviews with the white-box Boxleiter vv1.0 method. The full breakdown is shown on the page.
- Who developed The Sims™ 4?
- The Sims™ 4 was developed by MAXIS and published by Electronic Arts.
- When was The Sims™ 4 released?
- The Sims™ 4 was released in 2020.
- How many reviews does The Sims™ 4 have on Steam?
- The Sims™ 4 has 83,065 Steam reviews, of which 86% are positive.
Ecosystem
indielist positions The Sims™ 4 within the Adventure segment so players can surface comparable titles by shared tags and genre rather than by storefront promotion. On the developer side, MAXIS's other releases and Electronic Arts's wider catalog are one click away, letting developers benchmark where The Sims™ 4 sits among a studio's body of work and how its publisher's portfolio performs. Because indielist maps studios, publishers, games, and funding into one connected graph, the same The Sims™ 4 page serves three audiences at once: players hunting their next Adventure game, developers studying how comparable projects were positioned and what they sold, and investors tracing which teams and labels are active in the space. A machine-readable markdown mirror of this page is published at the same path with a .md suffix for AI assistants, and its review, price, and sales-estimate figures are refreshed on a schedule rather than frozen at launch.