Paradox Interactive has completely canceled Life by You

Paradox Interactive announced today that Life by You from its studio Paradox Tectonic is now canceled entirely, after being delayed. Tectonic is led by former EA Play executive vice president and head of The Sims label Rod Humble.

A once-promising version of The Sims, it seems like it just wasn’t going to be good enough and so rather than cause another failure, they canned it completely.

Extract from the press release:

“For a long time, we’ve had hopes for Life by You and the potential we saw in it, but it’s now clear that the game won’t be able to live up to our expectations. A version we’d be happy with is too far away, and this is why we are making the difficult decision to cancel the release. In the future, we are expected to perform at a much higher level, and it is obvious that we have work ahead of us,” said Fredrik Wester, CEO of. Paradox Interactive.

“We’ve had poor results in recent releases,” Wester continued. “Even though we are now starting new projects in a different way, it is clear that we need to make further changes so that the quality is more consistent and the promises we make to our players are kept. We need to evaluate the how we manage projects and how we organize ourselves, because we will and must improve. We have a very strong financial situation and a strong portfolio of core games, which allows us to remain confident in our future.

Pictured: Life By You, photos taken from the Steam page

A detailed announcement was posted on the official Paradox forum by Mattias Lilja, Deputy CEO of Paradox Interactive, which was essentially a slightly wordier version of the above, but ended on this note:

“Ultimately, our job is to release games that are fun, interesting, and challenging for our players, and every decision we make should be made with that goal in mind. When we achieve that, we earn our paycheck. So, How can we make sure we don’t end up here again? Honestly, there’s no real guarantee that the games will be difficult to pass, and we’ll definitely make mistakes as these things go on. unfold, always become painfully obvious in hindsight, but we still shouldn’t reach this kind of magnitude. We need to take a long, hard look at what got us here and see what changes we need to make to become better. Ultimately, our mission remains the same and we will continue to take all necessary measures to achieve it.

The release notes that this will have a “negative” impact on their second quarter of “208 MSEK” (nearly 20 million USD).

Paradoxes aren’t really doing well lately, as Wester noted above. Looking at the games they have released, there is Millennia released in March, which has a mixed score on Steam and the player count has dropped like a rock since its release. Then there’s Star Trek: Infinite, a fancy new version of Stellaris, which they abruptly stopped all updates for last year and which now has a very negative recent review score. At least FOUNDRY, which just came out in May, seems to be doing well so far.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.