So... Today we have terrible news for the simmer community. The best (and only one that was appealing to me) contender ever seen to compete with The Sims was just cancelled. We can only hope for good things coming for The Sims as the other competitors are bad, in my opinion, sorry. The 2D scribbled Sims of Paralives are awfully ugly (I can't shake that A-Ha song each time I see a preview of the game 🤪) and Life the Life has a nice proposal (I bought their pre release version on the day I first saw it and even made a couple of videos) but it feels more like an experiment than a fully fledged game (no hate). The graphics are sort of realistic but also a bit depressing. Everybody is a bit too poor/dirty/unappealing and it feels like you're simulating life in the old Soviet Union (sorry), which makes it a bit dated/specific and not aspirational as a Life Simulator should be...
As you can see above, it's official. Paradox Interactive released an official statement informing everybody that their project is cancelled. 😭
Hi all,
Sadly, we’ve decided to cancel the release of our long-awaited life sim Life by You. This was an incredibly difficult call to make and is a clear failure on Paradox’s part to meet both our own and the community's expectations. We realize this raises some large questions; here we hope to shed at least some light on why we opted to cancel, rather than delay as we communicated earlier.
Life by You has been in the works for a long time and we’ve been very excited about the promise and the potential of this game. Our hope was always that it would be able to leave a mark in this exciting and new genre for us. That’s why we’ve opted to delay it twice, to give the studio and the game a fair shot at realizing the potential we saw. For each delay we made, we've seen incremental improvements, which in hindsight may well have led us to focus on details rather than the whole picture.
A few weeks back, we decided to hold off on an Early Access release in order to re-evaluate Life by You, as we still felt that the game was lacking in some key areas. Though a time extension was an option, once we took that pause to get a wider view of the game, it became clear to us that the road leading to a release that we felt confident about was far too long and uncertain. This is not to say the game has not shown any promising qualities; Life by You had a number of strengths and the hard work of a dedicated team that went into realizing them. However, when we come to a point where we believe that more time will not get us close enough to a version we would be satisfied with, then we believe it is better to stop. This is obviously tough and disappointing for everyone who poured their time and enthusiasm into this project, especially when our decision comes so late in the process.
That also brings us to the last part of this message, in which we would like to thank you, Life by You’s community. You have our gratitude for your enthusiastic feedback during the development process and your patience with our delays.
Sincerely,
Mattias Lilja, Deputy CEO of Paradox Interactive
You can watch my video on Live the Life below...
What do you think? Let me know in the comments' section below!
