Paradox Interactive Cancels Life By You After Successive Delayed Releases

Highlights

Life By You, a life simulation game from Paradox, has been cancelled due to developmental challenges.
Paradox’s deputy CEO expressed disappointment in the decisions.
Players now have to find alternative competitors to The Sims.

Life By You, Paradox Interactive‘s foray into the life simulation genre, has been cancelled. This disappointing news was delivered by Paradox’s deputy CEO Mattias Lilja via a post on the company’s forums.

Life By You had been delayed thrice, first from September 2023 to March 2024, then to June, before what turned out to be a final indefinite delay. According to Lilja, Life By You was “lacking in some key areas” and the road towards release was “far too long and uncertain.”

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“Life By You has been in the works for a long time and we’ve been very excited about the promise and potential of this game,” the post reads. “Our hope was always that it would be able to leave a mark in this exciting and genre for us. That’s why we’ve opted to delay it twice, to give the studio and game a fair shot at realising 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.”

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“Life By You had a number of strengths and the hard work of a dedicated team that went into realising them. However, when we come to a point where we believe 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 out decision comes so late in the process.”

Lilja goes on to say that games are difficult to get right, but they’ll be looking “long and hard” about what went wrong so the studio learns from its mistakes. You can read the full post here.

Life By You was touted as a competitor to The Sims, the life simulation behemoth from Maxis that has dominated the genre for over two decades. With the expertise of a studio known for systems-based games in Paradox, there was a lot of excitement to see what an alternative to The Sims could look like.

With the sudden cancellation of Life By You, players will have to look elsewhere for a credible competitor to The Sims. There are a couple of projects in the works, like inZOI from Krafton, or Midsummer Studios’ untitled life simulator.