The Sims Bunker Of The Present & Future

Basically three types of people have told me in the past that they visit this website from time to time to check for new content or have visited this website in the past to see what it was all about.

The first group is casual Sims players, who only play the game two or three times per year, in longer marathon sessions, to clear their minds, in the spirit this website, and all my previous writings/posts about The Sims Bunker on various other platforms. Most of these players play the free, base version of the game with very little, if any, DLC. Most of these same players, as far as I’ve been told over the years by the ones who have engaged somehow, have been following me for a long time online through other channels, for other reasons, and my therapeutic application of The Sims is just “one of the things” they’ve come to associate with me.

The second group is more obsessive/hardcore (lol) Sims players, like myself, who follow all the Simfluencers on YouTube, read the Subreddit regularly and may even participate in its Discord server at some point, and buy most, if not all of the DLC (but we all collectively agree “fuck Batuu”.) These players don’t come from my existing community, but got here by googling some variation of a Sims challenge. They read the “The Moody Family Cult Challenge” page and maybe my main page about what The Sims Bunker is, but then they never come back. Or they probably only come back to re-verify certain aspects of the challenge or print out/save the rules to try it themselves. That page gets the most direct traffic and almost all of it comes from Google.

The third group are my Facebook friends, who have either never played any iteration of The Sims, or stopped playing the game a long time ago and remember it fondly. These folks visit exactly once per year, every November, when I participate in Extra Life by playing Sims for 24 hours, because I link my Extra Life page with my total donations over the years when I make my initial post there about the event and again when I post to kick off Game Day.

All three of these groups come here for the promise of Sims content, as little content as there may be on this site. I mean, there are only three pages and a barely updated blog!

But, because almost everything in the world has to be crappy in 2026, especially in the United States where The Sims is made, our beloved franchise has been sullied. Their parent company, EA (Electronic Arts), has been bought out or sold to Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law) and the Saudi fucking government for an astronomical amount of money. So much money in fact, that I don’t think there’s even a snowball’s chance in hell that any ethical company could ever afford to buy the game from them in the future. Even if we all boycotted and tanked it, which it appears The Sims community is mostly trying to do in response, the new owners are not likely to sell it at a loss.

I think do think the boycott is working, though, or at least doing something. I now get an e-mail about once every three days from The Sims, trying to entice me back into playing the game or buying new DLC. Previous to the buyout, I only got one or two e-mails per pack total, but maybe that’s also because I always bought the pack so they knew not to send me more e-mails idk 🤷🏼‍♀️ All I know is that they’ve full on spammed me about Spongebob DLC, the Royalty DLC, and the log-in events associated with them, to a degree that I’ve never personally seen from The Sims before.

So Where Does This Leave Me?

The biggest YouTube Simfluencers have switched over to other games, leaving the EA Creator Network and vowing not to purchase any new Sims DLC. Some however, are still playing with the DLC they already owned pre-buyout and creating content with it, which I disagree with because they’re still creating content that may entice new players to the game who are unaware of or wouldn’t care about the EA sale.

Personally, I am choosing to not play any of The Sims games or DLC I already owned pre-buyout, and obviously I won’t be buying any new DLC, because it just doesn’t feel good to me anymore. I believe the ride is officially over and it’s time for me to let the franchise go.

I haven’t fired up The Sims since Extra Life in November 2025 and have no intentions of ever doing so again. I will be backing up my save files “in case of a miracle”, uninstalling the game, and removing the Sims stickers from my gaming laptop (seen above).

My main event for Extra Life Game Day this year, knowing full well it would be my last year playing Sims for the event because the buyout was announced a few week prior, was my Sunny & Harold Sims, created in the likenesses of me and my partner, having a wedding because it was a big milestone event and I knew I could never top it. It seemed like the most appropriate way for me to say goodbye to the franchise that’s been my favourite game and one of the cornerstones of my mental health for the past 26 years.

I guess I’ll never get to have played a Sim from birth through to death like I was trying to do with my first legacy family headed by Mya Moody, or complete my own Off-Grid Cult Challenge headed by Charlie Moody, but I’m fine with that. It’s just a game and none of it is real. 🤷🏼‍♀️ (Unlike the reality that the game’s new owners want women subservient and The Rainbow Mafia and all our allies to “disappear”, among other atrocities…😒)

So What’s Next?

Last time I checked, I had put around 1900 hours into The Sims 4 since 2014. But a little known fact about me, is that I have also put 1775 hours into Animal Crossing New Horizons since it came out in 2020. So really, for the past 6 years, “The Sims Bunker” has mostly been me choosing to play marathon sessions of Animal Crossing over The Sims 4 anyway.

Pivoting the focus of this smol website into more general gaming makes sense, and the spirit of the Sims Bunker is still there:

I still largely play when I’m burnt out and need to rest and replenish my brainmeats.
I still encourage adults, especially women, to do the same because I think it’s important for some of us to have permission to do so, if only from some strange woman on the internet.

This site has always been about me giving adults the permission and justification they need to just pause, do something fun, low risk, high reward, and creative every now and then without feeling guilty about it.

So my plan, over the next little while is to archive and re-write my written explanation of what the Sims Bunker is on the main page and remove The Moody Family Cult Challenge from the menu at the top of every page. It’ll still show up in Google results when people search for Sims challenges, it just won’t be the main feature of SimsBunkerDotCom any longer. Finally, I’ll be designing a new, less Sims-centric logo.

The site will always be called Sims Bunker, and I will always refer to my extreme gaming mode for curing burnout, depression, and anxiety as being in “The Sims Bunker”. The Sims Bunker is a state of mind not tied to The Sims franchise exclusively, but to the specific set of stimuli that games like it provide. This site will be about those games.

Switch-ing Focus On Deck

I am fortunate enough to have a pretty decent gaming laptop, as well as both a Steam Deck, and I just upgraded from a coral Nintendo Switch Lite to a shiny new Switch 2. (I qualified “Nintendo” even though it’s sort of redundant for most people, in case my mom is reading this. 😅)

The latter means that, for the first time since N64 (also Nintendo, mom, from the ’90s 😆), I can play games on my TV, which has made playing my usual games an entirely different experience. For the first time ever, I can actually see Stardew Valley, that I have about ~900 hours put into on Steam Deck but only 70 hours on my Switch because it was literally too small for me to see! I can actually see details in Animal Crossing that I didn’t even know were there! (I plan to make a post about the upgrade to the Switch 2 Edition of Animal Crossing specifically, eventually!) And when a dragon attacks in Skyrim, I can actually see the whole dragon!

I find Animal Crossing extremely helpful for my social anxiety, specifically. I bring my Switch to parties and other social events where there will be many conversations around me, because I find that if I focus on Animal Crossing, it also allows me to listen better in chattery environments. I can actually narrow down the voices and focus with my ears, on one conversation and potentially participate, whereas without the game in my hand I have a terrible time trying to follow what’s going on in the room. I assume this is due to my general neurodiverence. (I have bipolar disorder, general anxiety disorder that was recently reclassified to social anxiety disorder, c-ptsd, and agoraphobia. My son also thinks at base level I’m autistic because they were recently diagnosed as having ASD and we’re pretty much the same.)

Upgrading to a Switch 2 meant that I could show my partner, Harold, what I’ve done in Animal Crossing for 1800 hours for the first time, by playing on the TV! It also means that somehow – and I’m not sure how yet – I can record an Animal Crossing island tour video for the first time and put it on YouTube to share here! I’m very excited to show off my plans for 2026’s “forever island” overhaul, and the end result once it’s finished!

Theoretically I can stream using the Switch too, but I have 0 interest in that if I’m being honest. I feel like that would be truly boring content and I’m not putting on makeup to play Animal Crossing! That defeats the purpose! 🙅🏼‍♀️💅💄

Stay Tuned…?

I can’t promise there will be new content here regularly, in fact it’s highly doubtful. I’m extremely busy IRL and divide my free time between social events, and many different interests and projects. Currently, I’m in the very delicate, preliminary stages of writing a book, and after many false starts over the years, I’m trying not to get distracted and abandon the project by getting sucked in by another one. This site is another one…

That said, the one “pressure valve” I’m allowing myself during the writing process is playing Animal Crossing, which is why I treated myself (invested in my mental health, more like it) when I randomly saw an “open-box” Switch 2 at Best Buy for $200 less than everywhere else. It was the very same day Nintendo surprised everyone by announcing the recent Animal Crossing 3.0 update and Switch 2 Edition of the game, years after announcing there would be no more updates, so it felt like a sign to upgrade.

I’m not much of a talker for making compelling gaming videos, but I am a documentarian and compulsive sharer of my own life, so that may include occasional blog posts here with screenshots of Animal Crossing builds and Happy Home Paradise/Hotel rooms I’ve done, custom design codes I’ve found to create those builds or that would make a great build in general, maybe some of the wacky “adult” dialogue my villagers come up with, and possibly the “beautiful mind shit” that I put into planning an island overhaul on paper in a notebook.

Will anyone visit or be interested enough to read any of this? Probably not. I expect no one to care but me – maybe the few gamers in my Discord could be enticed to read the occasional post – and I have no goals or expectations with any of this. Like most of my projects, it’s just a natural byproduct of what I happen to be doing anyway and will or won’t happen regardless of audience.