Review: The Sims 4 Businesses and Hobbies

I have a soft spot in my heart for business-oriented games. Whether running a cafe or becoming a freelancer, something about gamifying real-world concepts makes things fun. Despite this existing in The Sims for a while, The Sims 4: Businesses and Hobbies has some interesting ideas to play with.

Building on features like retail stores and veterinary clinics from previous packs, The Sims 4's Businesses and Hobbies expansion pack kicks it up a notch by introducing all-in-one ways to create and customize your business without jumping through hoops. Some things are missing, but it's pretty solid overall.

The Sims 4: Businesses and Hobbies (PC [reviewed], PS5, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Maxis Studios
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: March 6, 2025
MSRP: $39.99

By far the most important aspect of The Sims 4: Businesses and Hobbies is, of course, making your own business. Rather than only having one or two business types, you can customize nearly every aspect of your company, from its activities to your fees and target audience. If you want to make a high-class, Michelin-starred restaurant, you can focus your business activities on cooking, eating, and drinking. If you're more into teaching, you can make an entire school and set your activities to attending classes, letting you turn your household into a family of professors, teachers, or researchers. There's even cross-pack compatibility if you want to make a cat cafe, University Commons areas, or anything else that comes to mind. Your options are nearly limitless as long as you have the creativity (and packs) to bring them to life.

Don't worry if you're not creative, though. Although you can customize every aspect of your business to fit your preferences, there are also presets to make things quicker and easier. That way, if you have an idea but don't quite know how to execute it, there's a good chance you'll find something similar to set up right away. I loved using these when I was first learning the pack and its new features, especially when I noticed how much cross-pack potential there was.

There's a lot to making a small business in this pack. Rather than just buying a lot, setting your prices, and hoping for the best, you've got all kinds of pricing strategies, customer satisfaction systems, and design aspects that all play into whether your company succeeds. Even if you have a Sim with level ten painting selling masterpiece-level art, having trash piles everywhere or being rude to your customers will annoy them, and they won't hesitate to tell you. Similarly, a mid-level character can build up their business from scratch. As long as you're friendly and keep things clean, you'll get positive ratings. It all adds up, and I'm all for it.

Businesses and Hobbies also take things a step further with features like business perks, alignments based on your behavior with your customers, and employee management. These can drastically change how you run your company, from giving your employees bonuses to setting your business' lot on fire for insurance payments. Everything has consequences, just as it should be in business. Employee and customer behaviors are sometimes finicky, but it was still fun overall.

One of the most handy parts, though, is the reintroduction of room management that originally came with For Rent. If you run a business from home and don't want customers randomly sleeping in your bedroom, you can set public and private rooms to separate these from your business's operating spaces. You can even have one massive room available to the public and a tiny house on the opposite side of the lot you live in if that's what you prefer. When I say there's limitless potential in how you run and design your business, I mean it.

You may have noticed I haven't mentioned the "Hobbies" part of The Sims 4: Businesses and Hobbies yet. This pack strongly focuses on monetizing your hobbies by creating a small business rather than introducing new ones. It doesn't expand much on new hobbies or ones that already exist. That said, we're introduced to two new skills in this pack — tattooing and pottery — with supporting lots and business presets that help you monetize them quickly and easily. These two skills might be my favorite part of this expansion, especially with how in-depth you can go with customizing tattoos and creating pottery. I do believe there was a missed opportunity to add piercings into the mix, but maybe that'll come in a base game update one day.

Speaking of tattoos, we now have custom tattoos for our Sims. I didn't realize just how great this could be until I spent some time diving into CAS a bit deeper and checked out Paint Mode for tattooing, but this may very well be one of the most interesting features I've seen in The Sims 4. Although you can always use a preset introduced in this pack or past ones, having the freedom to create your own and upload them to the gallery for others to enjoy is very satisfying.

Beyond that, the CAS additions are pretty standard, with Build Mode having a mix of functional items for your small business and generic decorative items. I was surprised how few business-related furniture items there actually were, making it feel like you have to rely heavily on other expansions and game packs to get the right feel for your business. I don't hate it, yet there were plenty of chances to add items like cash registers, clutter objects you'd find in an average shop, or even more variety in general rather than a dozen variations of string lights.

The aspect I had the most trouble with by far was Nordhaven, The Sims 4: Businesses and Hobbies's world. It's a very stylish European-styled area that I enjoy exploring, with 12 lots to customize however you wish. What's the catch, then? Four of these lots are empty, one is an unowned residential home, and the rest are a mix of community lots and other households. I appreciate there being a default tattoo parlor and pottery business to showcase these skills and the pack's small business functions, but there was a ton of potential to have small shops, extra community lots, or several residential spaces that challenge you to set up your business in particular ways. The few available lots look great and fit the vibe well, yet this is noticeably smaller than many previous packs, and one-third of the lots are empty, which raises a few questions about why this happened.

Overall, The Sims 4: Businesses and Hobbies takes pre-existing mechanics and ideas and amps them up by turning just about any activity into a paid business. The thrill of creating a business and managing your expenses while keeping customers happy is exciting, and the way this pack implements this idea works well. I had a blast playing through this expansion, even if part of it was watching my employees and customers dance rather than buying products or getting the services I was providing. Opening my business is challenging and exciting, but closing my doors for the night and venturing into the town reminds me that that's all there is to this.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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