That was my gut reaction too when I first saw it. I'm kind of accustomed to an economic model for video games that works differently, but...it's not intrinsically crazy. If that is someone's hobby, then, hey, if they get a lot of time out of it, it could be worth it. If someone gets, I dunno, say, a jetski, they're gonna be paying more -- probably significantly more -- than $1k, and I suspect that there are a lot of The Sims players who have gotten a lot more hours out of The Sims than a lot of jetski owners have out of their jetskis.

I think that it'd only work for most people for games that have a really substantial level of replayability, that you can get many hours out of. If a fully-loaded copy of The Sims is worth $1k to you, then you're saying that you'd rather have that than 20 $50 games. For me, at least, that's a pretty tough sell, because there are single $50 games that I would rather have a copy of than The Sims 4, much less 20.

On the other hand, the game provides a fairly-unique experience. Not a lot of competition in that space, other than the prior entries in the series. It's not like, oh, the first-person-shooter genre where there are dozens of alternatives at a more-conventional price. If you're dead-set on having a game like that, well, you don't really have any other options.

https://gamerant.com/sims-4-players-majority-young-women/

60% of Sims 4 Players Are Women Aged 18-24

So, basically, the game is targeting a specific demographic that I suspect has been underserved by the video game market. There are lots of genres, say, I dunno, competitive first-person-shooter deathmatch games, that target roughly their male counterparts in age. It may also be that a lot of those women are buying one game. I know one woman who bought a Mac some years back specifically to play The Sims.