If you'd put money on The Sims 5 being free-to-play at launch, you can cash out your winnings now and go put them in a secure location so you can buy all the inevitable DLC in its wake. According to an EA job posting spotted by Sims Community, the next Sims will be a "free-to-enter game."
The Head of Marketplace and Monetization job posting has since been pulled from EA's job portal but was specific to the next major Sims game, currently codenamed Project Rene. Two of the role's primary responsibilities were listed as "Own Project Rene's in-game marketplace of content and UGC (free and paid)" and also "Own pricing of all content in this free-to-enter game." From those two bullets, we can draw a couple of reasonable conclusions for The Sims 5:
