The Sims Competitor Life By You Delays Early Access Release

Last summer, publisher Paradox Interactive announced an updated release date for Life By You‘s early access period. Originally, the game was due to be out last September, but the team decided to delay it to March 5, 2024. Today, the team has announced a second delay for the studio’s The Sims competitor. Now, Life By You is scheduled to start its early access period on June 4. That’s a three-month delay, so it’s not quite as substantial as what was announced last year, but it does mean fans will be waiting even longer to get a new take on The Sims.

Life By You Early Access Release Date Delayed

View on X

The news was revealed in a new video from Paradox Tectonic general manager Rod Humble, who said, “Our decision to move the start of Early Access is rooted in our commitment to creating a fun game and an enjoyable player experience, right from the start of our Early Access. We are just as excited as the rest of the community for the game’s release. As such, we want to ensure that it’s as smooth and fun for you as possible, and lays a strong foundation for building out Life by You during Early Access.”

Humble goes on to say that the team will be using the three months to improve the game enough to have it in a place where the developers can work with its community during early access to build the best game possible. The best way for them to do that is to take this time and quash many of the bugs that are still in the code, so that players can focus more on finding new features they want in the game and not on helping discover bugs that need to be ironed out.

Of course, that doesn’t make the delay any less disappointing. Fans of The Sims have been waiting for a new game to pop up and challenge Electronic Arts’ stranglehold on the genre. Between Life By You and Paralives (an upcoming, one-person project), players will soon have a few options, but it’s going to take some time before either of them are ready for primetime.

What Makes Life By You Different From The Sims

One of the biggest differences between Life By You and The Sims is that the former features a fully open world. That means players can walk around their world without any loading screens, meeting their neighbors and finding quests to complete. Another way Life By You is very different from The Sims is that Paradox uses real-language conversations. That might seem like a small thing, but with The Sims exclusively using Simlish, Life By You will have the opportunity to tell fully-featured stories in its quests. 

Outside of those two features, The Sims players will find most of Life By You very familiar. Of course, those two features are major ones, so it’s unlikely that Life By You will feel like a copycat in any sense of the term. Keep in mind that the game is launching in early access, so some of the listed features could easily change as Paradox continues development.

Life By You is set to launch on June 4 on PC via Steam and the Epic Game Store.