Life By You Canceled By Paradox

For those looking for a game to compete with the likes of The Sims, you may want to sit down for this. Paradox has announced that it has canceled its life sim game Life By You before it ever sees the light of day.

The game was originally set for an early access release on June 4 before being postponed. Now, just a month after that announcement, the game is no more.

“Sadly, we’ve decided to cancel the release of our long-awaited life sim Life by You,” Paradox CEO Mattias Lilja said. “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.”

Lilja’s announcement continued with an explanation of the game’s cancellation and development.

“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,” he said. “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.”

Lilja says that the decision to delay early access was done so the team could “re-evaluate” the game as a whole. Through that process, he says, the studio’s confidence in getting the game out in a reasonable time was dwindling more and more. While the game had made progress, Lilja says that they felt that more time creating the game wouldn’t get it to a point they were happy with.

“This is obviously tough and disappointing for everyone who poured their time and enthusiasm into this project, especially when our decision comes so late in the process,” he said.

He closed his statement by saying that Paradox will evaluate what led them to this decision and this point. The goal, obviously, is to not have to do this with a game again.

“Games are difficult to get right, and we’ll definitely make mistakes, which, as these things go, always become painfully apparent in hindsight, but still shouldn’t reach this kind of magnitude regardless,” he said.

“We have to take a long and hard look at what led us here and see what changes we have to make to become better. In the end, our mission remains the same, and we’ll continue to take whatever steps we need to do just that.”

What do you think of Life by You being canceled by Paradox? For more Insider Gaming, subscribe to our YouTube channel for exclusive shows, news, interviews, reviews, and more.

Related