Paradox Announces life-sim "Life By You" is Cancelled

[John Elden Ring]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/life-by-you-is-cancelled.1688889/

Hi all, 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.

 

[xollowsob]

 

[2spooky5me]

Nooooo!
We don’t have any real competition to The Sims… and this would have at least made EA sweat a bit.
I know the game is in rough shape, but damn! This sucks!

 

[Batzy]

Nooooo!
We don’t have any real competition to The Sims… and this would have at least made EA sweat a bit.
I know the game is in rough shape, but damn! This sucks!

The citi skylines dev should try making a sims game. They are good at the sims city part

 

[Infinity]

Paradox is mismanaging too much of their games. Flops and cancelations. Bloodlines 2 will likely flop later this year. Such a shame.

 

[Zzero]

This one was by a team out of socal that was stocked with former Sims devs. Sucks to see it go, I can't imagine the studio surviving this seeing as it was their raison d'etre and they are, otherwise, an "asset" in a very highly priced market, far away from, in a bad timezone for, and speaking a different language than their owners.

Sucks to see it happen but Paradox's ambitions beyond grand strategy have really blown up in their face. Another failed player in "the year of closures."

 

[Evilnemesis8]

This one was by a team out of socal that was stocked with former Sims devs. Sucks to see it go, I can't imagine the studio surviving this seeing as it was their raison d'etre and they are, otherwise, an "asset" in a very highly priced market, far away from, in a bad timezone for, and speaking a different language than their owners.

Sucks to see it happen but Paradox's ambitions beyond grand strategy have really blown up in their face. Another failed player in "the year of closures."

Indeed:

Paradox Interactive has decided to cease further operations in the wholly owned studio Paradox Tectonic (Tectonic) in Berkeley, California. The studio has since 2019 led the development of the game Life by You, whose release is canceled, and employs 24 people.

This is difficult and drastic news for our colleagues at Tectonic, who’ve worked hard on Life by You’s Early Access release. Sadly, with cancellation of their sole project we have to take the tough decision to close down the studio. We are deeply grateful for their hard work in trying to take Paradox into a new genre, says Fredrik Wester, CEO of Paradox Interactive.

No wonder the game was not up to par, sure there's always outsourcing of the gruntwork, but a team to this size is not set up for success when it comes to making such a type of game.

Maybe this team would've been allowed to cook if Paradox was doing better, but they've been fumbling for years with 2023 and 2024 being particularly bad in terms of product releases and their reception/commercial performance and this is an "easy" team to cut.

 

[Zzero]

Aaaaaand.... they're gone.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/paradox-cancels-life-by-you