The Sims has been a massive cash cow for EA, so it wasn’t super surprising when Paradox Interactive announced Life by You, their take on The Sims formula developed by a new team led by former Sims boss Rod Humble. Unfortunately, Life by You didn’t end up being the easy layup it seemed like it should be, as the game’s early access launch was delayed multiple times, and now Paradox has announced they’re outright canceling the game.
Here’s what Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja had to say about Life by You being canned…
“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.
Our job is to release games that are fun, interesting, and challenging for our players, and our every decision should be taken with that purpose in mind. When we get that right, we earn our pay. So, how do we ensure we don’t find ourselves here again? Honestly, there are no real guarantees. Games are difficult to get right, and we’ll definitely make mistakes, which, as these things go, always become painfully apparent in hindsight, but still shouldn’t reach this kind of magnitude regardless. We have to take a long and hard look at what led us here and see what changes we have to make to become better. In the end, our mission remains the same, and we’ll continue to take whatever steps we need to do just that.”
Paradox Interactive has struggled in recent years, with the much-anticipated Cities: Skylines 2 being beset with issues at launch, and games like Star Trek: Infinite and the Civ-challenger Millenia flopping at launch. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has also been through a protracted and messy development cycle, with the project’s success being far from secure. A successful life sim would have really added to Paradox’s portfolio, but instead Life by You joins the company’s string of recent failures.
What are your thoughts on the current state of Paradox? What can they do to turn it around?
