EA has announced that the popular Sims franchise is coming to the iOS and Android mobile platforms soon.
Almost two decades on since its successful debut on PC, the mega-popular social simulator is coming to mobile devices properly.
The Sims Mobile will be a port of the game for iOS and Android, whereas previous non-Desktop and non-Console releases were more limited, such as the The Sims Freeplay.
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Sounds like a good idea from a marketing standpoint...but I do wonder about performance issues. I know that the last time I played the Sims 3 on an i5 with a 970, the game sometimes dropped to 1frame/5seconds and rarely got above 20FPS. That was with mods to allow it to use my video card because the devs designed the game to only work with cards that were available at release. Since that last time I played there have been no updates. They would basically have to re-write the whole game just to make it work poorly on even the best smart phones.
That's true to a point but with source code you can often get away with changing a relatively small number of things and just running it through a different compiler. It may be a few months of coding for one person to do it really well, as opposed to a year for a dev team to re-write, patch, and modify the existing game to use something like 5% of the resources, which is basically what you would need to do to make it run well on a high-end phone. It is possible; the game is incredibly inefficient...but it would be more like a clone than a port.
