Shock as The Sims rivals Life By You canceled by Paradox

Crazy news comes to us: the highly anticipated life simulator and rival to The Sims, Life By You, has been canceled by publisher Paradox Interactive.

Things were getting weird for Life By You when the early access period was delayed indefinitely just days before its launch earlier this month and now, a few weeks later, all that hard work has seemingly ended in the room. assembly. for real.

The question of how this happened just days into an early access period if it was that bad, without having been spotted before, must surely now be asked of the higher-ups.

In a statement, Mattias Lilja, deputy CEO of Paradox Interactive, said the game was lacking in key areas and that there was no specific time when it would have been ready. This is quite a long statement to articulate.

“Unfortunately, we have decided to cancel the release of our long-awaited life simulation, Life by You. This is an incredibly difficult decision to make and is a clear failure on Paradox’s part to meet our own and the community’s expectations. We realize that this raises big questions; Here, we hope to shed at least some light on why we chose to cancel, rather than delay, as we communicated earlier.

Life by You has been in the works for a long time and we are very excited about the promise and potential of this game. We always hoped that it would be able to leave a mark in this exciting and new genre for us. That’s why we chose to delay it twice, to give the studio and the game a chance to realize the potential we saw. For every delay we’ve made, we’ve seen incremental improvements, which, in hindsight, may well lead us to focus on the details rather than the big picture.

No deadline extension granted

“A few weeks ago, we decided to delay the Early Access release in order to re-evaluate Life by You, as we still felt the game was lacking in some key areas. Although a deadline extension was an option, once we took that break to take a broader view of the game, it became clear to us that the path to a release we were confident in was far too long and uncertain. . This isn’t to say that the game didn’t show any promising qualities; Life by You had a number of strong points and the hard work of a dedicated team who worked to make them happen. However, when we get to a point where we feel that more time won’t get us close enough to a version that we would be happy with, then we think it’s best to stop. This is obviously difficult and disappointing for everyone who has devoted their time and enthusiasm to this project, especially when our decision comes so late in the process.

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 succeed, we earn our salary. So how can we make sure we don’t end up here again? Honestly, there are no real guarantees. Games are hard to get right, and we will certainly make mistakes that, as these things unfold, always become painfully apparent in hindsight, but still shouldn’t reach that 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 whatever steps are necessary to achieve it.»

The question remains whether another publisher will pick up Life By You, but that seems unlikely now that it’s so tarnished. It’s a real shame because we were hoping to see The Sims’ first real competitor, well forever and this whole sorry episode raises more questions than it answers.

Life By You is still available to wishlist currently on Steam