I think "were" is the correct tense. EA's dictates for SimCity (2013) ended up crashing that franchise entirely, and a decade into The Sims 4, EA has admitted it's planning on endless expansion packs for Sims 4 rather than making a Sims 5, with the community largely debating whether or not the best Sims game is Sims 2 or Sims 3.
The Sims 4 was a shockingly awful product, being a retool of an in-development Sims MMO after the dramatic failure of the always online SimCity (2013) it lacked (and probably still does lack) the majority of features from the previous installation, such as an open world.
Right, they have plenty of good and dormant IP, they're just uninterested in or bad at executing on it. Cities Skylines (1, not 2) did well, for example.
