The Sims clone inZOI is set to be the surprise hit of 2025

A new game has shot to the top of the most wanted list on Steam. and it means EA may finally have some serious competition for The Sims.

When we spoke to the director of Split Fiction recently, we asked him why no one else was copying him, considering his last game, It Takes Two, sold over 23 million copies – while having a much smaller budget than many games that have sold less.

He didn’t know, but then the games industry is very peculiar about what it will and won’t copy. Cosy games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley are still the preserve of Nintendo and indie developers, despite selling by the tens of millions, while The Sims has sold almost 200 million copies in the last 25 years – and yet hardly anyone has ever tried to mimic it.

That is set to change though, with Korean-made game inZOI due to enter early access on Friday, March 28. You might not have heard of it until recently, but the game already seems set to become a Monster Hunter Wilds sized hit.

Although inZOI will also be released on consoles there’s no indication of when that will be, and the early access is purely on PC.

That’s not going to be a problem for publisher Krafton though because inZOI is currently the most wish-listed game on Steam, beating Hollow Knight: Silksong, Valve’s new multiplayer game Deadlock, Elden Ring Nightreign, and Mecha Break.

Although it’s worth pointing out that of those five only inZOI and Nightreign have actual release dates.

We don’t mention Monster Hunter Wild’s name randomly, as it achieved the same thing in the run up to its release and has gone on to become the biggest game of the year so far, breaking Steam records as it went.

Whether that’s also the fate that awaits inZOI remains to be seen, but at the moment there appears to be more interest in Asia than in the West. Steam doesn’t reveal exact figures though, just an overall ranking, so it’s impossible to quantify the level of anticipation until it comes out.

Interest has likely been buoyed by the free Creative Studio app that was released over the weekend and allows you to create your own characters and buildings, ready to place them within the full game should you choose to buy it.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle for the game though is that the amazing looking graphics require a pretty beefy PC to run, which the sort of casual gamer that likes The Sims doesn’t tend to own.

That’s precisely why The Sims goes for a more cartoonish style, so it’ll run on as many PCs as possible and also be relatively futureproof, because it’s not trying to be photorealistic.

The other problem for inZOI is that most early reports suggest it’s not actually that good, at least in early access form. That doesn’t always matter when it comes to a game’s success, although it might affect its long-term prospects if the only thing attracting people are the graphics.

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