Sims-like simulation game Life By You is canceled

Paradox is canceling Life By You, the ambitious Sims-like life game from Paradox Interactive and Sims 2 lead Rod Humble. The studio announced Life By You’s cancelation in a new forum post and vaguely outlined the reasons behind the decision.

Life By You’s cancelation comes a few weeks after Paradox delayed the game’s June 2024 early access launch, itself a date three months delayed from the original planned early access release.

“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,” Matthias Lilja, Paradox’s deputy CEO, said in the post. “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. 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.”

Lilja did not explain which aspects of Life By You were so troublesome that Paradox believed cancelation was the only option and said the latest build had some “promising qualities.” However, Lilja also said that the studio believed more time would not be enough to create a version Paradox would be satisfied with and decided it “is better to stop,” despite the project entering its fifth year of development and demoing at Gamescom 2023.

Lilja closed the statement by saying there are no guarantees this situation won’t happen again, as making video games is difficult.