The Sims 4 is free for everyone to download and play from today
Happy 'The Sims 4 is free day', as the popular simulation game has just become available to download and play for the grand price of diddly squat.
There's no longer any need to wait for it to drop in price to get your hands on the perfect method to while away the hours of your own life by pretending to live someone else's.
EA have confirmed that from today (18 October) you'll be able to download your own copy of The Sims 4 for PCs, Macs and consoles and play it for free.
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Meanwhile, if you've just bought The Sims 4 and are feeling a bit silly that it's about to be given away for free you can console yourself (geddit?) with a free furniture expansion pack.
More information about this giveaway will be revealed at a special stream on The Sims' YouTube and Twitch channels at 10am PDT, which is 5pm GMT.
This is probably quite a clever move on EA's part, since The Sims 4 has been out since 2014 and pretty much everyone who wanted to buy it has probably got it by now.
These days The Sims makes money from selling new waves of DLC, so by going free with the base game they'll be hoping for legions of new players who want all those expansion packs.
The first thing anyone does when playing The Sims is spend about 10 hours in character creation tweaking every single slider until you get your sim just right.
Obviously the second is working out how to kill off your finely crafted computer character in cruel and creative ways.
Popular methods of offing your sims include trapping them in a pool until they drown, or just building a wall around them until they starve.
Or, if you're anything like me, you kill your first sims entirely by accident because you put the fridge in the wrong way round and none of them could access any food.
I chalked that one up to a learning experience and learned that back in the good old days of The Sims 2 you could earn a decent bit of money selling off the gravestones which pop up when a sim dies.
One of the best things about The Sims is you can take the game and tell pretty much any story you want, and it turns out quite a few people like recreating their favourite shows.
Some fans like recreating psycho serial killer Joe from hit Netflix series You, others prefer making pretty much the entire cast of Tiger King and seeing how they get on.
As for what you'll do, that's entirely up to you.
Topics: Technology
Joe Harker