It looks like The Sims 5, also known has Project Rene, has been canceled. This information was allegedly spotted in the LinkedIn profile of a former Maxis developer, and while the profile appears to have been updated since, internet sleuths have uncovered more evidence that The Sims 5 no longer exists.
The Sims 5 appears to have been quietly canceled around April 2024
The profile in question was first spotted by X user @SimmerBerkay, who chose not to disclose who the profile belonged to, but did share screenshots of it revealing that the unnamed developer was working on The Sims 5 for PS5 until its cancellation. Some folks claim that the profile belonged to one Thomas Sincich who left Maxis in April 2024, but when I personally checked his LinkedIn page at the time of this writing, there was no mention of Maxis anywhere.
Here’s where things get interesting, though. Fans have since discovered that a number of Maxis employees were laid off by Electronic Arts around April 2024, while others updated their profiles to indicate that they had stopped working on Project Rene and moved back to Sims 4.
There’s some speculation that Project Rene and Sims 5 were two different games, but given that folks appear to have moved back from Project Rene to Sims 4 around the same time Sincich allegedly left Maxis claiming that Sims 5 was canned, we’re leaning towards both being the same thing.
One of the screenshots purportedly of Sincich’s profile can be seen below, courtesy of SimmerBerkay.
