The Sims™ 3
Fair · Strategy · 2011
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 54.9h
- Value
- $0.36/hr
- Reviews
- 86% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 74% over the last 30 days against 86% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 128 MB Video Card with support for Pixel Shader 2.0, 6.5 GB of storage. Windows only.
The Sims 3: Create the perfect world with full customization at your fingertips. Refine personalities and help fulfill destinies.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $2.99. That was July 2018. 34 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 75 percent off, roughly 9 weeks apart.
Value puts it in the top 4 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 92 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 90 percent. Among the games that feel like it, The Coin Game ($13.39, scores 83) beats it on value, while it beats Youtubers Life ($19.99, scores 44).
Players rate it 86 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 74 percent. Something recent has soured the room. 34 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written February 2025 to August 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,864 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 768 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 54 percent of the 2,152 reviews written there were positive, against 86 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (currency, cosmetic); the score docks it lightly for that.
Finishing takes 54.9 hours; clearing it takes 154, which is 2.8 times the campaign.
15 years after release it still had 1.3K people in it at once.
Players
1,264 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Enjoy messing around on this when I first moved out of home. Had countless late night drinking sessions blasting music and enjoying the life I was building for my characters. Fantastic sandbox game. I would wait until it goes on sale.
Best sims game i've ever played, easily has the most content and engaging gameplay (even without dlc!) I've been playing this game since 2015 (much longer then Steam shows obvi). I think Sims 2 does have better built in storylines, but you can get into much more nonsense with Sims 3. !!!BEST GAME IN THE FRANCHISE!!!
plenty of bugs, make sure to save often, i like this over sims 4. seems like its faster paced and more of a snsadbox
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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The Sims™ 3 scores 67/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/47890/the-sims-3The BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 3, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.