Well this was some shocking news to learn last night from the Life By You homepage from Mattias Lilja, Deputy CEO of Paradox Interactive, the sandbox sim's publisher:
Sadly, we’ve decided to cancel the release of our long-awaited life sim Life by You. 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. We realize this raises some large questions; here we hope to shed at least some light on why we opted to cancel, rather than delay as we communicated earlier...
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. This is not to say the game has not shown any promising qualities; Life by You had a number of strengths and the hard work of a dedicated team that went into realizing them. However, 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. 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.
Life by You, as regular readers know, was being lead developed by Rod Humble, former Sims franchise studio head and Linden Lab's ex-CEO. (Read my interview with him from 2011.) The new game had all the appearance of an incredibly powerful Sims meets Second Life meets a new kind of god game. Even if that ambition was not being met by the current build, it's incredibly rare for a project to be cancelled the very month when it was so recently expected for early release on Steam. (Here's my post on that last April.)
I've reached out to the publisher for an official response, because Lilja's statement raises more questions than answers. One of my questions to Paradox is: Would the publisher be willing to sell the game to another studio or even to a group of users?
Because here's the thing:
The game as presented in videos already has more than enough features to be a minimum viable product among fans of games like The Sims and Second Life. For instance, check out the May video above, from a Sims influencer, walking you through the avatar creation process. From all appearances, this feature alone was already ready to go. There are literally thousands of YouTubers with millions of fans who create videos like this from various avatar customization platforms.
Here's another walkthrough narrated by Rod Humble, showing off quite a lot of gameplay features that are pretty much ready to go.
There is surely more to the story, but if I had to speculate, this could be one factor: Paradox is very much a traditional hardcore game publisher, and doesn't have the corporate DNA to deal with a very open-ended sandbox sim. (I imagine vexed executives asking questions like, "Where's the game?" "What's the goal here?" "Wait, there's no leveling mechanic, etc.)
In fact, Rock Paper Shotgun quotes a former Life by You developer confirming that the game was indeed ready to go:
We spent a month in purgatory, and did everything we could to prove to them we were worth launching, including things like finding potential buyers or suggesting cutting ties and going indie. We heard virtually nothing back [from Paradox]...
We were a strong team on a strong project ready to launch to a strong audience... Really I'd like to be much more fire and brimstone about it. I'm pretty pissed, not gonna lie. But I'm trying to stay kind and respectful. So instead I'll say: this industry has become a place in which you can deliver more than expected, have AA money behind you, and still have the rug pulled two weeks before launch.
As the official statement itself acknowledges, Life by You already had a pretty large following on social media, with 47,000 followers on YouTube -- again, these kinds of games are highly popular with streamers/YouTubers -- who would have surely made the game at least a modest hit.
I'll update this story when I can. Until then, sadly, life goes on, while Life By You does not. (Sorry.)
Hat tip: UC Irvine's virtual world anthropologist Tom Boellstorff, who has been closely following this game too.
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