Quid Brand Campaign Analysis
Three milestones of one creator-economy rollout, measured inside the same Sims conversation: the Maker Program announcement on March 3, the Marketplace launch on March 17, and the August Maker Pack wave. Each is anchored to its own day 0, because a window total would score age rather than performance.
Quid Monitor topic 2941233 · 7,935,843 posts · June 2024 to September 2026 · launch-anchored
The announcement was the event. On March 3 the Maker Program drew 413 distinct authors in 48 hours. The Marketplace launch, two weeks later, drew exactly the same number. A creator program that existed only as a press release matched the reach of the product it was describing.
The two then moved in opposite directions. Maker Program conversation halved on day two and kept falling: 94 percent of everything ever said about it landed within 30 days of the announcement. Marketplace conversation grew on day two, adding more distinct authors than day one, and was still running six months later.
The August Maker Pack wave never reached either. It opened on 44 posts and 43 authors, peaked three days late, and accounted for 3 percent of all Maker Pack conversation in the window. The packs were not the story. The announcement was.
Tiles are ordered by date, not by volume. The handoff order is the argument.
Counts are exact. Each milestone is measured under its own filter inside topic 2941233; the filters overlap, so these are not exclusive shares of one total.
2026-03-03
Creator program announced. Applications opened two days later, on March 5.
1,568
posts in window · 578 distinct authors
An announcement with no second act
The largest single day in the whole analysis, and the shortest life. Applications opened on March 5 and produced a second spike, then the vocabulary went quiet. By August the phrase drew four posts a month.
2026-03-17
In-game storefront went live on PC and Mac, with Moola as its currency. Console followed.
6,997
posts in window · 3,662 distinct authors
The only milestone that built
Grew on day two rather than decaying, and carried the rollout from March into September. It also absorbed the argument: 628 negative posts against the Maker Program's 137, because it was the thing players could actually be charged for.
2026-08-21
Five Maker Packs published to the Marketplace. Three were pulled the same day; two stayed live.
2,574
posts in window · 767 distinct authors
A drop, not a launch
Three of the five packs were pulled the same day as a publishing mistake, and the conversation peaked on August 24 rather than August 21. Read this tile as one drop. The Maker Packs line itself opened in March.
Daily posts from each milestone's launch day. The y axis is logarithmic: every gridline is a tenfold step, so the gaps are wider than they look. Values of zero are clamped to the axis floor.
The August Maker Pack wave is still inside its window, so its line stops at an explicit marker rather than at the axis edge. Daily buckets reconcile to their 48-hour windowed counts at 0.00 percent error for all three milestones.
Equal 48-hour reach is where the similarity ends. The Maker Program kept 39 percent of its day-one posts on day two and 44 percent of its authors. The Marketplace kept 77 percent of its posts and gained authors, ending day two with 125 percent of its day-one author count.
That is the difference between an audience reacting to news and an audience arriving at a product. A campaign that adds voices on day two is being discovered. One that loses half is being commented on and then forgotten.
Concentration says the same thing as a single number. The Maker Program put 39 percent of its entire conversation into its first 48 hours. The Marketplace put 11 percent into its own, because it had five more months to spend.
Day 2 as a percentage of day 1. Above 100 percent means the milestone added voices on its second day. The August wave's figure rests on a 44-post day one and is flagged accordingly.
Engagement is unavailable in this topic, so durability is stated as concentration: how much of a milestone's conversation fell in its opening window.
The Maker Program spent 94 percent of its entire conversation inside 30 days. The Marketplace spent 31 percent, because it kept going. The August wave's 13 percent is low for the opposite reason: most Maker Pack conversation predates it, starting in March.
Maker Packs post the highest net sentiment at 85.4, and it is the least informative number here. It rests on 79 negative posts. Treat it as directional.
Negative volume tracks reach, not quality. The Marketplace scores lowest at 54.9 because 628 people argued with it, and 628 people argued with it because it was the milestone that reached them. A brief that ranked these three by sentiment alone would recommend shipping less.
Composition is share of classified posts. Maker Packs carry 79 negative posts, which is too thin a base to rank on, and that score is excluded from the verdict.
The recurring complaint across every platform is the revenue split, and it is specific: creators keep 30 percent. It surfaces in the drivers as "earn 30 cent USD" on 127 posts, and it is the load-bearing claim in the Reddit, YouTube, and news coverage alike.
Underneath it sits something harder for EA to price its way out of. The top negative behavior attached to the Maker Program is "not own" on 55 posts. The sharpest negative attributes are "scam game in history" and "cancer to modding community." Players were not arguing that the packs cost too much. They were arguing that content which used to be free was being enclosed.
The Marketplace inherited that argument in full: "not support" on 122 posts, "reject" on 90, "block them" on 110.
Driver counts are posts carrying that phrase under each milestone's filter.
X carries the majority of every milestone, which is precisely why engagement had to be dropped: the aggregate reports zero for that channel.
Shares are of classified posts only. Source-type classification covers 50 to 84 percent of each milestone's posts. Reddit posts are returned under a Forums source type with reddit.com URLs and are labeled from the URL.
The three milestones share a vocabulary. Of the 1,568 posts matching the Maker Program, 1,369 also match the Marketplace filter: 87 percent. Adding the three campaigns gives 11,139 posts against a true union of 8,426.
Matching in this index is sentence-level, so one post can satisfy more than one filter, and the arithmetic proves it: inclusion-exclusion on these counts implies a negative three-way overlap, which cannot exist in a clean partition. An exclusive split of the same data returned 1,002 posts where the set algebra predicts about 180.
So these are three overlapping lenses on one rollout, not three slices of a pie. No share-of-total split appears in this brief, because none would be honest.
| Pair | Posts matching both | Share of the smaller set |
|---|---|---|
| Maker Program ∩ Marketplace | 1,369 | 87.3% |
| Marketplace ∩ Maker Packs | 1,066 | 41.4% |
| Maker Program ∩ Maker Packs | 19 | 1.2% |
| Sum of the three filters | 11,139 | n/a |
| True union | 8,426 | n/a |
These milestones are five months apart. A window total would hand the win to whichever launched first. Day 0 alignment is the only basis on which a one-month-old drop and a seven-month-old announcement compare.
Day-2 retention is available from the moment a campaign lands, on equal terms for all three. It separated the Marketplace from the Maker Program before either had a week of history.
The Marketplace has had 191 days to accumulate conversation against the August wave's 34. Every cross-campaign total in this brief carries that gap; only the launch-anchored figures are free of it.
The campaign with the most negative conversation is usually the one that reached the most people. Read the Marketplace's lower score as evidence of scale, not failure.
Each of these is written so it can be re-run and settled by data rather than argued.
For this rollout the announcement was the peak, and the launch two weeks later did not beat it. Any future creator-economy milestone should set its reach benchmark on announcement day and treat the ship date as a retention test.
The August wave's 48 percent sits on a 44-post day one, which is too thin to trust. The clean test is the next wave: does it clear a 100-post day one, and does it hold above 60 percent on day two?
The drivers say the objection is enclosure of previously free content, not the cost of a pack. Discounting, bundling, or free drops address a complaint players are not making. A clear statement on what stays free would.
Marketplace conversation fell from 4,413 posts in March to 98 in August. The question worth tracking is whether pack drops alone can sustain it, or whether it only moves when EA announces something.
Ten posts across six platforms, spanning the announcement, the launch, and the packs.
“One of the biggest issues about the Marketplace that is commonly discussed is that CC creators only get 30% of the revenue while they are doing 100% of the work.”
r/HighSodiumSims · clumsycat146 · 2026-03-20 · View post
YouTube
“In theory an opportunity for CC creators to make official content for the game and make money while doing so excites me as a creative at heart. But in practice, EA will keep 70% of the revenue earned from the CC creators in the marketplace.”
vstreetlove · 2026-03-05 · View post
“EA has finally dropped its UGC marketplace for its popular Sims franchise, but players aren't impressed. While these creators (known as 'Makers') will, according to EA, have "creative ownership" over their work, GamesIndustry.biz reports that they only get a 30% cut of the revenue.”
The Daily Dot · 2026-03-20 · View post
“It's great that console players finally get access to creator content, and it's nice to see creators getting paid officially. But I can't help but wonder if this is just a way of paywalling CC that used to be free?”
r/Sims4 · SnooSprouts3744 · 2026-03-03 · View post
YouTube
“Earlier this month, they released the marketplace where players can buy additional content. This marketplace also allows creators in the Sims Maker Program to earn from their creations. So basically, EA wants to sell us mods.”
Punkshroom · 2026-03-31 · View post
“This was just posted in the official Sims Discord. So glad it's coming to console soon too 🥹”
r/LowSodiumSimmers · az25blue · 2026-03-03 · View post
Quid Monitor topic 2941233 · launch-anchored · generated September 24, 2026. No customer or team context was applied to this brief.