Spending money on this game is difficult to justify, at least from a game play perspective. The enjoyment of the game comes in small doses. If you had unlimited funds and unlimited donuts, you could build everything and rush every task. This would leave you with very little motivation to continue playing the game, especially if you weren’t reading the dialogue between the characters.

The charm of The Simpsons in general has always been its strong writing. Decorating your town is one thing, but without the characters to populate that town, the whole experience feels rather empty. In that regard it does makes sense to want to purchase as many characters as possible, to make your town feel as diverse and populated as the television show. Unfortunately to do that you’re going to have to spend some money, as some of the best characters are put behind a pay wall, or worse, are only available for a limited time.

Recently the problem with that has been the increased cost of premium content. Take a look at the different options for purchasing donuts versus the cost of the items you can buy. Say you really wanted to add Sherri & Terri to your town, a premium character that cost 150 donuts. The first three options of 12, 60, or 132 donuts aren’t even enough to get you that one character. You’re going to have to spend at least $19.99 on 300 donuts to get just one piece of premium content.

For twenty dollars you could purchase a brand new game on a service like Steam, and still have money left over for lunch. Is it really worth it to spend that much money on something that is only going to add a marginal bit of diversity and enjoyment to a game you’ll likely only be playing for five to ten minutes per day? It may not seem like much, but micro-transactions can put a huge dent in your wallet without you even realizing it.

One other thing to consider is that whatever you are buying, it isn’t tangible. You can’t even play the game without an internet connection, or if Origin is down. So if either of those two scenarios happen, how angry are you going to be that you can’t access the content you poured hundreds of dollars into?

It isn’t worth it to cheat, because you’ll get bored with the game because there won’t be anything left to do. It’s also not wise to spend so much money on content that doesn’t really add that much to the game. So what is the solution? Honestly donuts should be cheaper, much cheaper. There is no reason (other than greed, the fact that people are continuing to buy content at these high prices, and basic business economics) to have premium content priced so high.

You should be able to spend a dozen donuts and add a new character to your town. It’s much easier to justify spending two dollars on a character than it is twenty, especially when new content keeps being added to the game every couple of weeks. If you really want to see the quest dialogue, check the walkthroughs. If you want to see the character animations, check YouTube or maybe you’ll get lucky and see them in one of your friends’ towns.

Save your money. Play responsibly. Enjoy what you are given for free.