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The latest expansion for The Sims 4, Businesses and Hobbies, has introduced a major wrinkle to the 11-year-old game in the form of a system that allows players to design and customize their own businesses from scratch. This expansion takes building blocks laid down by a pair of older expansions–the retail businesses and other active careers of Get to Work, and the restaurant businesses of Dining Out–and makes something totally new and much improved out of them, enabling you to mess around and make money in many new ways
If you want to make an ice skating rink with a bar in it, you can do it. If you want to set up a laundromat where you relax in hot tubs while the laundry runs, you can do it. Basically, if your basement or yard is big enough to fit the thing you want to do, you probably can do it.
But that immense level of customization means there are a huge number of options to deal with, as well as a lot more granular details to sort through than we usually have. When you’re designing your business, you can choose up to five activities that customers will participate in–but you’ve got more than a hundred activities to choose from, most of which won’t make any money directly. And then you have to hire, manage and pay employees, market to a target audience that makes sense for your business, build the business itself, and then actually engage with it; just like any active career in The Sims 4, like being a scientist, you’ll need to do your job if you want to earn.
While it’s not exactly difficult to make money in Businesses and Hobbies, the large breadth of options means it can take longer than usual to understand how everything interacts. But that’s what this article is for–we’re going to go step by step through the process of developing your small business. By the time you finish reading it, the big picture of The Sims 4: Businesses and Hobbies will be a lot clearer.
