Life by You Canceled. The SIMs Rival From Paradox Is 'Clear Failure' of Publisher
Paradox won't fight the The Sims series. After Life By You was delayed, the company abandoned the project, considering it as „clear failure.”.
Life By You, a rival of The Sims from Paradox Interactive, has been discontinued. After delaying the release almost a month ago, Mattias Lilja, deputy president of Paradox Interactive, announced that the life simulator his team is creating won't see the light of day.
More time for Life By You isn't enough
The dev explained in a post on the publisher's official forum that the delay in the early access of LBY in May was intended to give the creators time to evaluate the current state of the project. However, the team concluded that the game still had significant deficiencies and even additional production time wouldn't allow the team to fill them.
That's why the difficult decision to stop work was made, despite the time and effort invested in the development of Life By You and the project's undeniable strengths. The priority should be to create interesting, challenging, and fun games.
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.
"Paradox's" failure didn't surprise the players
Lilja didn't dwell on the "mistakes" made during the production of Life By You. Nevertheless, he mentioned that after being delayed twice, the team has made significant progress. However, according to the creator in hindsight, the developers were too focused on the details rather than the overall project.
Lilja also admitted that this is a "clear failure" of Paradox, which allocated EUR 17 million for the development of LBY, and yet it didn't meet the expectations of either the team responsible for the game or the community.
Fans are openly expressing their disappointment over the abrupt cancellation of the project, which was expected to be at a very advanced stage of development, considering that its debut was originally scheduled for early access on June 4th. Internet users are wondering how such significant "shortcomings" were only discovered now, leading to the abandonment of production and the decision that further development isn't profitable, as interpreted from the creator's post.
There are also people who aren't surprised by Paradox's decision. In their opinion, even the latest materials from Life By You indicated that the game still needs a lot of time and even changes in the basic gameplay mechanics.
We can only hope that the termination of LBY won't lead to more significant job cuts. However, fans of life simulators can look out for many other games, especially InZOI, Paralives, Vivaland, and Projekt Rene (i.e. the new Sims).
