Despite being over a decade old, The Sims 4 is still getting new content. The latest expansion pack, coming to the game on March 6, 2025, is called Businesses & Hobbies. If you’re wondering what’s in it, it’s safe to say it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Now it’s possible for your Sims to have fleshed out interests beyond their career pursuits or other bigger systems, and even turn those interests into side hustles. Indeed, the gig economy has come to The Sims 4, and while you won’t be joining a predatory ride share app or delivering groceries for modern-day robber barons, you have the option of turning part of your living space into a small business front. Hooray!
I attended a virtual preview event and got to check out this new expansion pack in action. Jokes aside, there are a lot of new features that might be more in-depth than one would expect, especially with the new skills being introduced. Those are pottery and tattoos, the poster activities of small business owners in The Sims 4. The tattoo skill is especially impressive, because you literally get to design your own tattoos on top of learning, improving, and monetizing the skill itself. There’s a range of options based on your own artistic proclivities, from using pre-made stencils all the way up to fully designing your art.
Running a business has requirements, such as carving out a space with the right equipment in the right type of building, paying a fee to register a license, and actually having the skill you want to utilize. Or skills, plural! One of the cool things about the small business feature is that it’s cumulative based on the activities you have access to, which come from other past Sims 4 expansions. For example, one of the demonstrators at the event talked about running a dance club with vampires, which goes a little further than running a weekly goth club at your local dive bar. You can sell snacks, run a gym, and set up a tattoo bed in a corner, all within the same space. It can get as wacky as you want it to be.
You can even become a mentor of your chosen skill, and using a new kind of whiteboard item, run classes and teach other Sims in your area how to make pottery or… be a vampire, I guess? You’ll also need to attend classes yourself to get started in certain skills, regardless of if you want to turn them into a business or not. Maybe you just want to decorate your spot with stuff your Sim made themself! Either way, there’s a process, showing that there’s more going on here than just a couple of new menus to click through.
That’s just a brief overview of what Businesses & Hobbies is all about, and there is of course plenty of nitty and gritty for dedicated Sims heads to dive into when the expansion launches. I’m certainly curious to learn about the mad science of capital and grinding people come up with, especially the folks out there loaded up on Sims 4 DLC already. For myself, I’m already kind of living this expansion in my daily life, and it’s a little mortifying to picture doing it twice over in a video game. But maybe I’ll consider hopping in fully when the expansion launches on March 6 to do a more fun version of that with a hobby I don’t have in reality.
The Sims 4: Businesses & Hobbies is available on March 6, 2025. We attended a virtual preview demonstration and were granted temporary access to the expansion on PC for this preview article.
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replyLucas White posted a new article, The Sims 4: Businesses & Hobbies brings the gig economy to Sims life
