Life by You, Paradox’s Attempt at The Sims, Canceled as the Publisher’s Struggles Continue

The Sims has been a massive cash cow for EA, so it wasn’t super surprising when Paradox Interactive announced Life by You, their take on The Sims formula developed by a new team led by former Sims boss Rod Humble. Unfortunately, Life by You didn’t end up being the easy layup it seemed like it should be, as the game’s early access launch was delayed multiple times, and now Paradox has announced they’re outright canceling the game.

Here’s what Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja had to say about Life by You being canned…

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“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