Update from 18.06.2024:
At the same time as the end of development, Paradox Interactive also announced the closure of the development studio Paradox Tectonic. According to the announcement, Life by You had been in development since 2019 and was the studio's only project, which previously employed 24 people.
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Original news from June 18, 2024:
Paradox Interactive has completed the development of The Sims-Competitors LifebyYou This was announced in a forum post by the publisher, which included a message from the deputy managing director Mattias Lilja According to him, a new review of the game showed that the game was too far from being in a good state. The game did have some strengths, but it was better to stop here. Lilja explained the decision as follows:
Life by You has been in development for a long time and we were excited about the game's potential. Our hope was always that it could make a mark in a genre that was new to us. That's why we delayed it twice to give the studio and the game a fair chance to reach its potential. For each delay, we saw incremental improvements that, in hindsight, perhaps mistakenly made us focus on details rather than the bigger picture.
In February of this year, the start of the now cancelled early access phase had already been postponed to July. At that time, too, necessary improvements were cited that would have led to the postponement. Life by You was only announced at the beginning of March 2023; it was to be a life simulation in an open sandbox without loading bars, in which the characters communicate with real language, mods were to be supported and, like in The Sims, the lives of individual people could be played out. The developer was the studio Paradox Tectonic, founded in 2019, and it would have been the studio's first work.
Paradox Interactive had the unfinished Cities – Skylines 2 which, despite patches, is still plagued by technical problems. The decision to stop development due to quality concerns is therefore contrary to previous decisions made by the publisher.
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