36
votes
Less than a month after the highly anticipated life sim Life By You was delayed without a new release date, Paradox has announced that the whole project has been cancelled
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- Title
- Paradox cancels life sim Life by You, CEO says they gave the studio 'a fair shot' but now 'believe it is better to stop'
- Authors
- Andy Chalk
- Published
- Jun 17 2024
- Word count
- 645 words
Well, that's a pity. More competition for The Sims is desperately needed. Thankfully, Paralives is still in development, though their announcement of "no DLC ever!" is super concerning to me -- I would prefer they make a reasonable DLC policy and not go back on their word.
Paralives is being funded in a... non-traditional way, which I think is a big part of the "no DLC ever!" stance.
What do you mean non traditional?
It's been almost entirely funded by Patreon for years.
Its development is funded by Patreon supporters (though iirc they did run a Kickstarter campaign at some point in the past too).
Scope creep is a hell of a thing. The developers for the vast majority of these open world real time sim games with a huge tangle of complex systems bite off more than they can chew. Peter Molyneux was doing it twenty years ago (that's how old Fable is, and he did it several times after that) and very little has changed since. Hello Games did it - by all accounts they eventually got there, but it took several years beyond what they'd planned. Star Citizen is ten years behind schedule. This studio was only founded less than five years ago! With their history of successfully financing games with complex systems but sane scopes, Paradox should have been able to set more realistic expectations.
I think most brand-new life sim games are going to struggle with scope creep right now. The Sims has the edge in being the first, and coming in a time when tech was limited. Customization was incredibly limited, you just changed the head and body. The graphics were simple enough that facial expressions weren't a huge priority, and they didn't have to focus on individual textures for every piece of furniture or make multiple variations. All Sims used the same set of animations for actions. We couldn't even set relations like marriage or parents/children when creating a new household.
Compare that to the Sims 4. All sorts of customization options for Sims, personalities and traits are now a major feature and can impact their animations. Emotions are a thing now and impact gameplay for better or worse. Building is more flexible than ever, you can place stuff at any angle and hang windows or decorations on walls at any height. You can resize stuff, choose from a big range of colors, some items can be combined—heck, you can ignore the grid entirely when placing stuff! There's kitchen cabinets! Flexible wall and floor heights! And that's just from when it first released, it's added more features to the base game since then.
They got to iterate and expand on the base concept over decades, and use the existing fanbase to gain funding for the newer games. Any brand new game will have to compete with the Sims in its current state, and when you're starting completely from scratch, that's not an easy task. It's all too easy for scope creep to become an issue.
The studio developing this has also been shut down:
- Paradox Interactive to close down Paradox Tectonic
How realistic would it be to hope that they open-source it in its current state rather than black hole it forever? I’d love to see what the community could do with it, even if it’s not commercially viable.
The IP still belongs to Paradox, so the odds are nearly zero. I can't think of too many times a cancelled IP had its assets publicly released. Only Paragon, and that's because it was used to get more people into Unreal Engine vs. Unity (especially when you see the license for those assets).
I saw some thing recently that explained why game companies don't release failed IPs even if they don't have plans to do anything with it. You basically are giving up something that will compete with you for people's time gaming and why add more competition to your other games? So in other words, there is actual motivation for them not to put out IP (not even no motivation to give it out, but motivation to not give it out).