Paradox cancels The Sims rival Life by You, says it was "lacking in some key areas"

It was in 2023 that Paradox Interactive revealed it had a rival to EA's The Sims franchise in the works, with it announcing Life by You with an early access release plan. However, after multiple delays, the publisher revealed today that the road to launch for the title has come to an end, with the project now being canceled.

"Sadly, we’ve decided to cancel the release of our long-awaited life sim Life by You," says Paradox Interactive Deputy CEO, Mattias Lilja on a forum post today. "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."

Life by You's original early access release was slated to happen in September of 2023, but a six month delay pushed it back to 2024. In early 2024, Paradox announced a new delay that would make the early access release happen on June 4. This date was even re-confirmed later to hopefully remove any fan fears of more delays. But May, 2024 brought along another delay, and this time, Paradox did not attach a new release window to the project.

Lilja said that even though each delay the company made to the in-house developed title showed "incremental improvements", it wasn’t coming together in a timely fashion, explaining:

"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 … When we come to a point where we believe that more time will not get us close enough to a version we would be satisfied with, then we believe it is better to stop."

The deputy CEO went on to say that mistakes "of this magnitude" should not happen again at the company as it looks into improving its internal processes. "Games are difficult to get right, and we’ll definitely make mistakes, which, as these things go, always become painfully apparent in hindsight," he adds.

Developed by Paradox's own Tectonic studio, the Life by You project was being led by Rod Humble, who has previously worked on The Sims series at EA. There's no word yet on what will happen to the studio or to Humble now that Life by You has been canceled.