Sims 4 Mac Out Now, Free For Sims 4 PC Owners

It seems ludicrous that a simulation of the middle-class lifestyle and the attendant pursuit of ever-more wealth and consumer goods isn't already available to owners of Macintosh computers, but there you go. In any case, The Sims 4 [official site] - but won't someone think of the pools? - is now out for OSX, and the good news is that if you already own it on PC you get the Mac version free.

This buy one, get one for a different operating system free emulates what Valve already do with Steam and OSX, and I think it's a great system. A friend bought a Mac the other day and was delighted to find that he already had a huge game library on Steam waiting for him. While this isn't exactly a concurrent release, it's an interesting little statement of intent to keep up with the multi-platform Joneses by EA. I wonder if we'll see more of this kind of thing as Mac adoption continues to rise and integrated graphics get ever so slightly less lame at gaming.

The bad news (but it is, really? I have ceased to care, personally) is that you'll need to install EA's Origin client on your lean, silver machine, whether you've bought a code or a box. The digital version of the game is currently discounted to a third off, by the way.

Here are the system specs, if you need 'em:

OS: Mac OS® X 10.7.5 (Lion)

PROCESSOR: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz Processor or better

VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce 320M, 9600M, 9400M,ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro or better. Video RAM of 256MB or better.

MEMORY: 4GB RAM

HARD DRIVE: 10 GB of Hard Drive space

MONEY: Too much of it

Oh, and you can also transfer your PC saves to Mac, though there's no automated or cloud system for it. Instructions are here.