Sims Competitor Life by You Cancelled

After several delays, Paradox Interactive has officially cancelled Life by You.

By Ricky Frech

While developer Electronic Arts continues to work on whatever The Sims 5 ends up becoming, several smaller studios have stepped up to reveal new projects in the life simulator genre. One of those is Life by You, a game from Paradox Interactive. Originally, the game was due to hit early access earlier this year, but the team had to delay the launch several times. Last month, Paradox announced that early access for Life by You was delayed indefinitely, saying "additional development time [was] needed." That news was sad enough for fans, but today the team announced that it was officially cancelling Life by You.

In the statement released by Paradox Interactive, CEO Mattias Lilja says the cancellation "is a clear failure on Paradox's part to meet both our and the community's expectations." He continued, "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."

Lilja did say that Life by You showed several "promising qualities," but that the game was ultimately unable to meet the team's expectations. He also mentions that the team will now be taking "a long and hard look at what led us here and see what changes we have to make to become better." 

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This is obviously disappointing news for the developers and the community. While there are several other life sim projects currently in the works, Life by You was seemingly on track to release first, potentially giving it a window to bring in a solid playerbase. Now, players will have to wait for inZOI, Paralives, or potentially The Sims 5 to release before they get to jump into a new life sim game. Unfortunately, the former two games aren't scheduled to launch any time soon, and we still don't know what Electronic Arts' next move will be with The Sims franchise.

That said, the hope is that this news won't be followed up with even more developers losing their jobs. As of this writing, Paradox hasn't announced anything on that front, but given how things in development have been going over the last several months, it would unfortunately not be surprising if something happens over the next weeks.

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