Krafton recently found itself in the awkward position of explaining why their supposed Sims-killer isn’t exactly killing anything. The publisher’s latest comments about inZOI focus heavily on sales figures while carefully sidestepping the elephant in the room.
Meanwhile, The Sims 4 continues doing what it’s done for over a decade. Dominating the life simulation space with numbers that make Krafton’s defensive statements look increasingly desperate.
inZOI‘s player count reality check hits different
The numbers don’t lie, even when publishers try to spin them. As of writing, inZOI sits at ~2,900 concurrent players with a 24-hour peak of ~3,500 according to SteamDB. Those aren’t typos, and they’re not good news for a game that was supposed to revolutionize life simulation.
Compare that to The Sims 4, which is currently maintaining ~26,000 players with a 24-hour peak of ~33,700. An 11-year-old EA game is pulling nearly ten times the concurrent players of the shiny new Unreal Engine 5 competitor. That’s not just embarrassing; it’s a complete reversal of what everyone expected.
In a recent statement to IGN, Krafton carefully defended inZOI‘s declining player numbers by emphasizing sales over engagement metrics:
inZOI continues to steadily generate sales, and as a single-player game, it would be most appropriate to refer to the additional sales count at each major update point as opposed to concurrent player count on Steam in measuring the game’s performance.
Krafton’s defensive stance reveals everything about how poorly things are going. When a publisher starts arguing that player engagement doesn’t matter for a live service Early Access game, you know the metrics aren’t painting a pretty picture.
The irony is palpable. inZOI’s launch might have actually reminded people why they loved The Sims in the first place. Nothing drives appreciation for what you have quite like seeing someone else fail to replace it, after all.
Early Access excuses only go so far
Krafton keeps emphasizing that Early Access is just the beginning, but that excuse only works for so long. Players aren’t sticking around to see what comes next, and that—fortunately or unfortunately—is a problem no amount of corporate spin can fix:
Early Access is only the beginning of inZOI’s journey, and in many ways our work is just starting.
The game launched with impressive technical features and photorealistic graphics that should have kept players engaged longer. Instead, the concurrent player count has dropped so dramatically that it’s now competing with games that most people forgot existed.
Performance issues, limited diversity options, and the controversial use of AI in development haven’t helped matters. When your “revolutionary” life sim can’t maintain player interest longer than a few weeks, the revolution clearly isn’t going as planned.
Now, of course, the ambitious scope and promising features are still there—but they’re all buried under technical problems and design decisions that feel disconnected from what players actually want.
Krafton has the resources and talent to turn things around, but they need to stop making excuses and start making the game people actually want to play.
What’s your take on inZOI‘s struggle to compete with The Sims 4? Are the current player numbers a fair measure of the game’s potential? Share your thoughts below!
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
