A former EA user researcher has publicly shared design documents and presentation slides that trace how Project Rene, the next major game from The Sims studio Maxis, shifted away from its original single-player, PC-first vision and toward a mobile-first multiplayer game shaped by Roblox's audience.
The documents come from Nate Bonham, a Senior User Researcher who worked on Project Rene from October 2023 to June 2025. His portfolio case study describes the internal research initiative that reframed the project's direction, complete with workshop photos, fashion study slides, and competitive analysis of Roblox genres. The case study was first surfaced by Sims Community after a user on the ATRL forums spotted Bonham's portfolio.
A studio built for a different audience
According to Bonham's documents, Project Rene's early development reflected the habits of a team that had spent the better part of a decade maintaining The Sims 4. Content produced in the early stages carried what he called "a PC-first, single-player mindset." That was a problem, because the game's target had shifted to a younger, mobile-first generation whose expectations were shaped by years of playing Roblox, not The Sims.
Bonham illustrates the disconnect with one pointed detail: the team was still designing skinny jeans as in-game cosmetics while the audience they were trying to reach "had started calling those same jeans 'mom jeans' and moved on to baggy."
Development reportedly started in 2018 with the intention of building a next-generation Sims game. By 2023, the research and product direction pivoted. Bonham describes moving the team away from evaluative research, which tests ideas already on the table, and into foundational and generative research: focus groups, fashion studies examining how the target audience actually dressed and shopped, and collaborative workshops.
Maxis developers sat down and played Roblox
One of the more striking details from the slides is an onsite workshop where Maxis developers played Roblox together and documented their reactions in real time. The dominant response, visible in one of the presentation images, was a wall of sticky notes asking "why?". Bonham writes that the team "felt they were being asked to lower their craft to match Roblox, and couldn't make sense of why our audience found it fun."
That gap pushed Bonham to create what he calls ride-along interviews: instead of writing traditional competitive benchmarks, he had Roblox players share their screens and narrate their own play sessions while he asked questions live. The goal was to understand not just what the audience played, but the motivations and mental models behind it.
Leadership then scaled the approach across the studio. Three cross-functional pods, each with a PM, a designer, developers, and a researcher, were assigned different Roblox genres that had potential overlap with multiplayer and simulation gameplay.
Bonham was careful to frame the objective in his portfolio: "It isn't about making a higher fidelity version of Roblox. In fact their players don't really care about that much. It's about understanding the motivations, mental models, and behaviors of an audience that grew up playing Roblox so that we can build an exemplary experience that delights and retains that audience."
What the research changed
The case study claims the initiative had concrete effects on the game. According to Bonham, the project's game manager credited the research with shaping multiplayer and social direction, prioritizing character-creation features, substantiating the switch to direct controls, and settling the final art and UI style. Developers who initially dismissed Roblox reportedly began inviting Bonham into standups to explore the platform together.
Whether this constitutes "copying Roblox," as some community reactions have framed it, or rigorous competitive analysis of an adjacent audience depends on where you stand. What the documents do confirm is that Maxis spent significant internal resources studying Roblox's audience, not just its features, and used those findings to reshape Project Rene's direction from top to bottom.
The early playtests that reached the public seem to reflect this shift. A 2025 playtest drew comparisons to Roblox's Dress to Impress, and the general tone of what players have seen so far sits closer to a social, multiplayer platform than a traditional Sims sequel.
Where Project Rene stands now
According to an unverified insider claim reported by Sims Community, Project Rene is functionally complete but has been put on hold. EA is reportedly uncertain whether the game aligns closely enough with The Sims 4's established brand to justify releasing it. The last working title the insider mentioned was "The Sims Together" or some variation. None of that has been confirmed by EA.
For longtime Sims players who have watched Project Rene's public-facing identity shift over the years, Bonham's documents fill in a piece of the story that was previously only guesswork. The pivot was not accidental or gradual. It was a deliberate, research-driven process that reshaped the studio's understanding of who the game was for and, by extension, what kind of game it would become. Whether that audience will actually show up for it is a question EA appears to still be weighing.
The life sim space has grown increasingly competitive, with projects like Paralives and inZOI each carving out their own identity. Project Rene staking its future on the Roblox generation is a bet that moves it further from those competitors and closer to a space where the rules, and the audience, look very different.
Source: Sims Community via Google News - The Sims 4