WATCH: 'The Sims' is coming to iOS, Android

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.

They'd have to anyway, really, as it's an entirely different platform (Linux/Android vs. Windows).

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.

nice one