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Life by You was aiming to be The Sims rival the world so desperately needed. While The Sims is loved by millions, it would have been great to see another game enter that life-sim genre that doesn't have well over $1,000 worth of DLC. Plus, competition is good for all parties as it pushes companies to innovate and take risks, which can lead to better experiences for players.
Sadly, Life by You was just cancelled by Paradox Interactive. The cancellation comes roughly a month after the planned Early Access release was delayed to an undisclosed future date. Paradox announced the full cancellation of the game in a statement issued earlier this week.
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.
In a bit of a contrast to Paradox's public statements, a former developer on the project say that the rugged was pulled out from them mere weeks before the game was set to launch. Willem Delventhal was a developer at Paradox Tectonic, the studio working on Life by You. In a writeup on LinkedIn, Delventhal says that the team was given a "thumbs up a few weeks before launch" and were surpassing internal metrics on development progress.
I cannot share specific numbers, but I can say that we had an internal metric we were aiming for that had been approved, and that we exceeded that number by a significant portion. We also got a thumbs up a few weeks before launch.
Then two weeks before launch we were told we wouldn't be launching. And just now that we've all lost our jobs. We were only informed of this via a public announcement.
We were not told why. Instead we spent a month in purgatory, and did everything we could to prove to them we were worth launching, including things like finding potential buyers or suggesting cutting ties and going indie. We heard virtually nothing back.
Then two weeks before launch we were told we wouldn't be launching. And just now that we've all lost our jobs. We were only informed of this via a public announcement.
We were not told why. Instead we spent a month in purgatory, and did everything we could to prove to them we were worth launching, including things like finding potential buyers or suggesting cutting ties and going indie. We heard virtually nothing back.
The cancelation of Life by You seems to be at least tangentially related to the abysmal release of Cities Skylines 2. Paradox is still trying to recover from that game's release some eight months after it was initially made available. Other upcoming Paradox published titles such as Prison Architect 2 and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 have been hit with several delays over the past several months and years. Bloodlines 2 development seems to be back on track and even had a lengthy gameplay reveal earlier this year.
