Summary
There was a lot of excitement aboutLife By You- finally a proven publisher inParadox Interactivewas going to use its resources to compete againstThe Sims, the genre’s monopolist. Unfortunately, after successive delays, Life By You was scrapped in June. At the time, Paradox’s chief executive officer, Mattias Lilja, explained the publisher felt that giving Life By You more time in development was not ultimately going to result in a game people would enjoy.
The Search For A Sims Competitor Continues
Now, at a media day in London, Lilja once again addressed the cancellation of Life By You. Speaking toRock Paper Shotgun, Lilja revealed Paradox hasn’t given up on making a life simulation game. “It makes sense to us strategically,” Lilja explained. “Finding that core team who want to do that game for us is a really good idea, and I think we should try again, if we have a similar opportunity.”
One of the problems Paradox claims Life By You had is the game didn’t have a long enough prototyping stage and grew to become a money sink for Paradox without a satisfactory end in sight. “We need to do it in a different way,” Lilja said. “We need to start with a smaller team. We need to do pre-production longer. We need to prototype a lot, before we go into big production, because when you have a full game team, quite honestly, it costs a lot, so any pivot is going to cost all of that.”
Paradox’s chief creative officer Henrik Fåhraeus was similarly candid in a separate interview, saying Life By You wasn’t visually good enough and also just wasn’t a better experience than The Sims. “What is the player experience going to be like, is it going to be better than The Sims 4 in some way, at least?” Fåhraeus proposed. “And the unfortunate answer to that is that I didn’t feel it would be, and the other people who tested it were of sort of the same opinion.”
Fåhraeus agrees with Lilja that a life simulation game still makes sense for Paradox, and it’s something the publisher will continue to ponder going forward.
Paradox Tectonic, the developers of the cancelled Life By You, was shuttered by Paradox, laying off all 24 of the studio’s employees. In the aftermath of the studio closure, game designer and former Paradox Tectonic employee William Delventhal claimed Life By You was inmuch better shapethan the studio’s parent company claimed.
Life By You
Life by You is a life sim from Paradox Interactive. With development led by former The Sims head Rod Humble, it features an open world, a vast amount of customisation, and the ability to create and edit almost every aspect of life.
