The only reason they were making a sequel was because there was going to be a competitor to their 10 year old game that would absolutely take the market share of this niche. Now that the competition died they can put the devs back to making a bunch of overpriced DLC for another 10 years or when ever another viable competitive game shows up on their radar.
EA knows their current Sims game has been a flop they had to make the base game free to play. They wanted a games as service model but 2013 SimCity had such a strong backlash they had to scramble to make it something else and hope no one noticed. So here we are with an underperforming game from a series that pretty much always topped the charts when it released a new game or expansion pack. Thats how bad they screwed up.