More gamers are NOT depending on corporate media outlets. They are making more of their purchase decisions based on peer-reviewed content. (My opinion) EA seems to be following the trend as paid reviewers tend to lean toward the sensational to try to get more views.

Chances are there are sub par gameplay systems or features that EA will patch to completion in the future but they don’t want to risk day 1 sales.

Unfortunately for EA the Sims will sell regardless of reviews. Why is that unfortunate you say? It is unfortunate because releasing an unfinished or unpolished game to the masses is gonna potentially turn them off to the series forever. The main audience of the Sims are gamers who rarely game and never read sites like this. If they jump into the Sims and the experience is worse than the Sims 3 or bad in general they won’t keep waiting for patches and updates. They won’t follow future update news. They will just stop playing and never look back. They had a similar issue (albeit smaller scale) with Sim city 4. The player base at launch was quite large but it dropped off incredibly fast due to quality issues. Those are gamers they likely won’t win back.