Paradox Interactive recently appointed Mattias Lilja as its new Deputy CEO to help strengthen its “pipeline of projects for the future”. Lilja’s first action in this role has been to deliver the unfortunate news that Life by You has been cancelled.
Paradox’s Tectonic studio, led by former Sims boss and Second Life CEO Rod Humble, was fully committed to developing Life by You, as stated in the delay announcement back in May. However, just a month later, it seems Paradox has pulled the plug.
Life by You was first delayed from its September 2023 release, pushed back until March 2024, before being delayed again until June 2024, and now it’s being completely cancelled.
Here’s the full statement:
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.
At the end of the day, 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.
A new release window wasn’t confirmed in the May delay, but development was said to be ongoing. While we didn’t expect it to be released this year, we had hoped to see it in early 2025.
“While we would have preferred to commit to a new release window, we believe it is more prudent to hold off while we plan ahead, rather than committing to a new date that we cannot be certain to meet.” said Lilja in the announcement back in May.
The life sim genre was starting to pick up the pace, but with Life by You now cancelled, we will have to look at a new Sims game in development from EA, Paralives from Alex Massé, and a new life sim game from Midsummer Studios CEO and former XCOM boss Jake Solomon.
There’s plenty to look forward to, but the fact is, we probably won’t see any of these games until 2025. Life by You is no more.
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