The Sims 5 Story Just Took Another Turn
On Wednesday, October 21, EA published a post called “Building EA’s Next Chapter” and the news for Sims fans was buried inside a much bigger story. The company announced around 400 layoffs and the closure of BioWare, and in the same breath confirmed that development on Project Lotus, the game most of us knew as Project Rene, has been paused.
The wording from EA was careful. “We’re going to prioritize our efforts on ‘Project Evergreen’ for The Sims to give the team more time to reach the full potential and vision for the game, and to help make this possible, we’re pausing development on ‘Project Lotus’,” the company said in an internal email that Kotaku obtained. Lotus had been in some form of production since at least late 2022 and was publicly framed as a free-to-play, social, mobile-first life sim.
The custom content crowd has a practical stake in this. The Sims 4 CC scene is one of the biggest in gaming, and any successor will live or die on whether it welcomes that community rather than fighting it. It is the same conversation people are having about GTA 6 modding right now, where a studio’s stance on user content shapes how long a game stays alive after its first year.
So was Rene ever The Sims 5?
For years EA insisted it was not, but a September 19 report from Sims Community made that position harder to hold. Art Director Mark Holmes, who spent close to six years on Project Rene, referred to it plainly as “Sims 5” in material the site reviewed. The picture that emerges is a project that started as a numbered sequel, got split into two efforts, and drifted toward mobile before being shelved.
Project Evergreen is the part nobody has officially explained. Dot Esports reports that it is talked about internally more like “The Sims 4: 2” than a clean break, and that an internal target of roughly next September has been mentioned, with no year attached. Treat that as a rumor until EA says something on the record.
What happens to The Sims 4
Nothing changes in the short term. The Royalty & Legacy expansion shipped in February, the Maker Program and in-game Marketplace launched on October 5, and the next bug-fix patch is listed for October 27. If anything, the Lotus pause makes The Sims 4 more important to EA, not less, because it is the only Sims game making money today. Sims players already know how that plays out, because The Sims 4 is twelve years old and still gets monthly patches.
The honest summary is that The Sims 5 as a name is as far away as it has ever been, but a successor of some kind is now the stated priority. That is more than fans had a month ago.
