Like a lot of simmers, I like to talk to the Gurus. Maybe it’s a reach for a common friend, a celebrity (honestly, how many of us can’t name at least a couple Gurus?), or genuinely have questions about errors bugs and upcoming releases; I don’t know. I think for me it’s a bit of the first two. I often read really long Twitter conversations involving Simmers and the Gurus (a lot of ones running to Graham because their ancient computer won’t render the game properly on highest settings and a lot debating the awesomeness of Grumpy Cat with Lauren) and have pretty much integrated morethanregular checks of my reader because I seriously enjoy reading them!

This time my (slight) obsession has turned up gold for me at least because I learned something new.

Let’s recap for newbies: The Sims 3 expansions are created primarily out of two studios; Redwood City in California and Salt Lake City in Utah both under the EA Maxis label. Each campus has it’s own people though sometimes producers go back and forth. On to the Twitter Conversation!

@SimGuruGraham thanks so much for the help, also weird question. Why is it that EA SL produce 2 EP’S a year e.g Supernatural and Showtime, however EA RS only produces one e.g seasons 🙂

@ Seasons was an extremely technically challenging EP; we knew upfront that we needed a longer development time on it. It was also actually a bit of an experiment – we thought that having a smaller team size with an extended development cycle might improve our overall work load per person, but in the end it didn’t really change much. That said, we’re back to alternating releases between the two teams 🙂

It’s up for you to argue away on the comments with each other about what you think the actual effect having a smaller team did to Seasons, and I am actually kind of hoping we do get a discussion going. Regardless, I never really clued in that they would have alternated development cycles prior to and now.

Another fact that I found out while doing some digging… there’s a group from my own Country of Canada too!