Life by You was a costly cancellation for Paradox Interactive, costing almost 20 million and causing its operating profit to drop by 90% in Q2 2024. We saw a rolling preview of it back in 2023, but now all we have to remember its early promise are screenshots taken from the last internal build.
Paradox’s Tectonic studio, led by former Sims boss and Second Life CEO Rod Humble, was fully committed to developing Life by You, as stated in the delay announcement back in May. However, just a month later, Paradox decided to pull the plug. It mustn’t have been an easy decision, the game showed ambition in taking on the Sims series, but it just wasn’t to a standard Paradox was happy with.
The following screenshots come from several artists who worked on the project, as shared by X user (formerly Twitter!) SimMattically.
Life By You will be lost in time, like tears in rain...
The avatars you could customise certainly look better than what we saw of them back in 2023, and it had obviously improved graphically during that time, but the potential alone wasn’t enough for Paradox as Deputy CEO, Mattias Lilja explained.
“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,” said Lilja. “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.”
You can view all the screenshots below, which will act as a memory of its development, and what could have potentially been a serious contender for the Sims franchise. The Sims still have the monopoly over this genre for now, but some upcoming titles could compete with it and bring some much-needed competition.
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