How many Sims games are there?

Four — if you mean the numbered games. About thirty, if you count every spinoff, console version and mobile edition. But the honest 2026 answer is stranger: the newest Sims game is free, has been the newest one for over a decade, and sells roughly 98 paid add-on packs worth about $1,500. Somewhere along the way, "how many Sims games are there" stopped being a list question and became a shopping question.

I.The answer depends what you count

The strict answer is four: The Sims (February 4, 2000), The Sims 2 (2004), The Sims 3 (2009) and The Sims 4 (September 2, 2014). Add the official spinoffs — The Sims Online (2002), the three Stories games (2007–08), The Sims Medieval (2011), the six-game MySims series, The Sims Castaway line — plus the console adaptations and two mobile games (FreePlay, 2011; The Sims Mobile, 2018), and the count of distinct games lands around thirty.

But the franchise hasn't numbered a new game since 2014 — the longest gap in its history, and a deliberate one. The product isn't a sequel anymore; it's a catalogue. Count every separately purchasable Sims product — thirty games plus The Sims 4's ~98 packs — and you're near 130 items, before the new community-made "Maker Packs" EA began selling through its Marketplace. That's why this page opens with a calculator instead of a list.

II.The $1,500 free game

On October 18, 2022, EA made The Sims 4's base game free. It wasn't charity — it was the purest version of a model this site keeps meeting (the console page calls it razor-and-blades): give away the razor, sell the blades forever. The blades, as of mid-2026: 21 expansion packs at $39.99, 12 game packs at $19.99, 20 stuff packs at $9.99, and 45 kits at $4.99 — about $1,500 of add-ons orbiting a $0 game, with price trackers through early 2026 putting the exact total between roughly $1,470 and $1,540 depending on the month's catalogue.

The packs themselves have become a genre of comedy. My First Pet Stuff (2018) is the infamous one — a pet-accessories pack that requires owning the separate Cats & Dogs expansion: DLC for your DLC. Bust the Dust sells vacuuming. Laundry Day sells washing machines — and, to be fair, the community voted for it. In 2025 EA layered on a Marketplace selling community "Maker Packs" through a virtual currency called Moola, bought in bundles that rarely match what anything costs. The quiz at the bottom of this page exists because, at this point, real pack names are genuinely indistinguishable from parody.

III.The dollhouse that came from a fire

The strangest fact in the whole franchise is its origin. In October 1991, the Oakland firestorm destroyed designer Will Wright's home. Rebuilding his life — re-buying every object a household needs, one by one — got the creator of SimCity thinking about daily life itself as a system you could simulate. The pitch that grew out of it was nearly killed repeatedly inside Maxis: a "virtual dollhouse" was considered unmarketable, and colleagues mocked the project as the game about cleaning toilets. It shipped on February 4, 2000, and within two years it had become the best-selling PC game to date. The most successful franchise in life simulation exists because its designer lost everything and noticed that putting a life back together is a game.

Each numbered sequel then added one big idea: The Sims 2 (2004) added ageing, genetics and aspirations — Sims could now be born, grow old and die of something other than a kitchen fire. The Sims 3 (2009) added the open neighbourhood. The Sims 4 (2014) launched, infamously, with fewer features than its predecessor — no toddlers, no pools — and spent years earning them back (pools returned free in late 2014; toddlers in 2017). It is simultaneously the most criticised and most commercially durable game in the series' history.

IV.The forgotten Sims: consoles, the DS, and a Black Eyed Peas cameo

A whole branch of the family tree barely appears in official retrospectives. In the PS2/GameCube/Xbox era, the console Sims games weren't ports — they were different games. The Sims Bustin' Out (2003) had goals, levels and a career ladder. The Urbz: Sims in the City (2004) chased street-culture cool so hard that the Black Eyed Peas appeared in-game and recorded music in Simlish for it. The Nintendo DS and GBA versions of The Sims 2 were original story-driven adventures — the DS game casts you as a hotel manager in a desert town full of aliens and secrets, and is remembered by a generation who never touched the PC original.

Then there's MySims (2007) — Nintendo-cute chibi spinoffs across Wii and DS, six games deep. The Sims 2 Castaway stranded your Sims on an island. The Sims Medieval (2011) reskinned the engine into a quest-driven kingdom sim. And the most ambitious failure: The Sims Online (2002), an MMO version that launched to huge expectations, struggled to find what was fun about doing chores together, and closed in 2008. Every one of these counts toward "how many Sims games" — and almost nobody counts them.

V.Twenty-five years without a rival — then three at once

For a quarter of a century, "games like The Sims" was a search with no good answer — the genre was a monopoly so total that the only alternative to a Sims game was an older Sims game. Then, within about eighteen months, everything moved. Paradox's Life by You — led by ex-Sims studio head Rod Humble — was cancelled in June 2024, two weeks after announcing its early-access date, and the studio was shut. Krafton's inZOI arrived in early access in March 2025: photoreal, Unreal Engine 5, and divisive — praised for its character tools, criticised for a sterile world and its use of generative AI. And in December 2025 the indie underdog Paralives — started by one developer in 2019, funded by Patreon, built by a team of about a dozen with no shareholders — finally launched into early access and was warmly received, especially for a build mode critics compared to the series' glory days.

So the genre The Sims invented finally has a real contest — at the exact moment EA itself changed hands in a take-private buyout agreed in 2025, and the pack model shows signs of strain. The monopoly years are over; whether the dollhouse's next decade belongs to the catalogue, the photoreal rival, or the twelve-person indie is, for the first time since 2000, a live question.

Quick answers

Four games, thirty if you're generous, a hundred and thirty if you're honest — and the newest one has been "new" since 2014, free since 2022, and worth $1,500 the whole time.