After repeatedly delaying the early access release of Paradox’s (Paradox Tectonic’s) in-house developed Life by You, the publisher has now canceled the entire project, which was already in a bad state due to the events surrounding Cities: Skylines 2…
Mattias Lilja, deputy CEO of Paradox Interactive, has announced on the Paradox forum that Life by You, which was planned for PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), will not be completed: “Unfortunately, we have decided to cancel the release of our long-awaited life sim Life by You. This was an incredibly difficult decision to make, and is a clear failure on Paradox’s part to meet our own and the community’s expectations. We realize that this raises some big questions; we hope to at least shed some light on why we chose to cancel rather than delay as we previously communicated. Life by You has been in the works for a long time, and we’ve been very excited about the promise and potential of this game. It was always our hope that it would be able to make a mark in this exciting and new genre for us. That’s why we decided to delay it twice, to give the studio and the game a fair chance to realize the potential we saw. With each delay, we’ve seen incremental improvements that, in hindsight, may have led us to focus on details rather than the big picture.
A few weeks ago, we decided to pause the Early Access release in order to re-evaluate Life by You, as we still felt the game was lacking in some key areas. While an extension was an option, once we took this break to get a broader view of the game, it became clear that the road to a release that we felt confident about was far too long and uncertain. This is not to say that the game did not have 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 reach a point where we feel that more time will not get us close enough to a version that we would be satisfied with, we feel it is better to stop. This is obviously hard and disappointing for everyone who has put their time and enthusiasm into this project, especially when our decision comes so late in the process.
At the end of the day, our job is to release games that are fun, interesting, and challenging for our players, and every decision we make should be made with that in mind. When we get that right, we earn our pay. So how do we make sure we don’t find ourselves here again? Frankly, there are no real guarantees. Games are hard to get right, and we’ll definitely make mistakes, which, as these things go, are always painfully obvious in hindsight, but still shouldn’t be of this magnitude. We need to take a long, hard look at what got us here and see what changes we need to make to be better. At the end of the day, our mission remains the same, and we’ll continue to take the steps necessary to do just that,” Lilja wrote.
After that, we wouldn’t be surprised if Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 fails and they are financially devastated.
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