If and when Paradox puts forth another life sim, I hope they pick a better name too. Searching "Life by You" for information or content is like finding a needle in a haystack.

IMO, this is where the gaming industry in general is at. Yes, there are always a few that manage to stay out of the fray, but for the most part it's "Here's our half-assed finished game, we'll get around to all the other stuff later." Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

RIP, Life By You.

Well, I'm a bit surprised but not very. It always felt a bit like there were pieces of a good game but there was no overall concept. I never felt like a whole thing, just bits and pieces of realized ideas.
I would be quite interested to know what finally prompted them to halt development completely.

Am I disappointed? Not very. I'm still much more looking forward to seeing what Paralives is going to be like.

Jeez, what a fricking shitshow. I don't know of any game that just gets cancelled in the same month that it was supposed to release. In an industry of common shit occurrences, that's probably the shittiest. Obviously not surprised but man... the way this entire project was handled from the perplexing development struggles to the marketing and communication strategies ought to be studied and taught as how to not do it. It's been particularly bad.

Really wondering if this will impact/scare the other upcoming life sims into changing their plans.

Such a shame, we need more competition in life simulation games. As well as lacking a solid concept for the game, cities skylines 2 shaky launch may have partially influenced this decision as well and Paradox Plaza are focusing mainly resourcing that game. Let's hope Paralives has a successful launch next year.

Why would it scare them? One competitor less. I do wonder which of the other ones will actually be launched, however; I am pretty sure only about Paralives and inZOI. Any bookies around?

I'm sorry Rod, but Life by You always looked like the weakest out of the three big "TS4 Killers" in development.

I really hate to be pessimistic, but what would this have been without all its issues and difficulties? A smaller version of the sims 3 with built-in modding tools with 10 years of PDX-style piecemeal DLC?

I feel bad for all the devs giving it their all, it must be a blow to have your years of work tossed.
Kind of a mess all around.

Honestly, it may be groundless but I've kind of wondered since Paralives revealed its target year if they only did it because LBY was coming so soon. If so, with it now not coming at all, I wonder if that relieves some pressure off them to have some wiggle room with the Paralives date. They can't take it back now that it's out but they may push it.

And with Inzoi, I'm wondering if they will look at this cancelation as being due to uncertainty of the market or of different factors, which could cause some uncertainty within their camp as well. Again, probably groundless but just a thought I had.

Though you're right, it's probable they'll look at this as a less intense playing field as well which is definitely a great thing for them.

I am really sad that this has happened. Of all the upcoming Lifesim games this one most closely matched what I wanted. I think it must have been a combination of the sheer difficulty of trying to innovate with a small team and then whatever tizzy Paradox have embroiled themselves into.
My trouble now is that the other contenders in the lifesim world seem a bit tame and underwhelming by comparison.

Paradox does seem like kind of a mess. I wonder if any other publishers would be willing to take on the project, but I sort of doubt it. It’s a shame.

I hope Paradox continue to invest in stuff like this though- they took a chance on Cities Skylines and it worked out wonderfully (although CS2 seemed to be a bit of a disappointment). It was a big risk to invest in a Life Simulator when EA were gearing up to announce their next, and since LBY was announced Inzoi has come along, which is major competition and big trouble for Paradox.

That is because of all the issues the game had, combined with Paradox struggling to sell Cities: Skylines 2. There were also some problems with the specs for the game. I am not surprised at all, but I do feel sad because the whole project seemed like it was in development for years. That is just a very harsh decision and the cancellation is going to cost a lot of money.

Some videos shedding light on the cancellation: Simmer Erin and SatchOnSims

"I definitely think shareholders are holding modern video games back" (SatchOnSims). That the gist of it. I knew Paradox from their very start, when they were a nice indie developer, and I know them now, when they are a big producer and as greedy as EA. I am pretty certain that C:S2 fiasco was not Colossal Order's fault; they were pressured to release an unfinished game and now they are trying their best to repair it.

LBY, on the other hand, was just too bad to release even as an early access game and so they cut it off. I wonder if we'll ever really learn whose fault it was. My guess is that the original, developers, Paradox Tectonic, "wholly owned" by Paradox and by now wholly eliminated, just could not cope with such a concept; Rod Humble was supposed to be their savior but he came with his own set of fetishes - suddenly, everybody in the game was running around and collecting everything in sight (I'd love to see the man's room) while other sides of the game remained neglected. Still, all of them were just small fry; the real culprits were CEOs, the only ones who could make real decisions, but now they will be able to say that they did the right thing, shareholders will grudgingly agree and everybody will move on.

This was the one I was looking for. It still needed loads of work, but I really liked how they were adding modding tools ingame. If it would look and play like TS3 and had customization like LBY and ran like a modern game, I would already be happy.

But after seeing a lot of comments on social media and gaming websites I learned that Life By You apparently wasn't pretty enough :/ This also shows with the hype surrounding inZoi. So sad to see how many are blinded by the pretty graphics of inZoi without realizing how limited the gameplay is that has been shown so far. But oooh, pretty graphics! :/

I really hope Paralives will make it. Otherwise sims will be dead to me. I am not interested in whatever always online monstrosity EA comes up with.

I wish they'd shown us more about the world itself, such as the extent to which you could customise it, and whether there were plans for more worlds or if you could make more. Also, what else was there to do, apart from go to a park or a shop and collect herbs? I felt they really seemed to be concentrating on the small things, and not showing us that there would be an interesting game to play that would hold our attention in the long term. I wanted to see sports, games, hobbies- could we make stuff with things we collected? Could we make our own careers, or own our own businesses? Could Youmans hate, love, get angry?

The thing I think that both LBY and Sims 4 did wrong is to have social media input. What made Sims 1, 2 and 3 so great was that the developers had a very specific idea of what they wanted the game to be, and what they wanted to achieve and include. The LBY team, like Sims 4 throughout its life, is taking note of what the users of the social media platforms are asking for. Trouble is, they are getting a skewed perspective- they are not taking into account the demographic of the commenters, nor are they holding true to their own ideas and goals. If you watch interviews with Will Wright about the early sims games, he has a very clear vision and a very clear idea of how he wanted the sims to work, and how he wanted them to interact with their environment and react to environmental input. He talked about Maslow's heirarchy, mood, happiness, need, environmental hygiene, consequence... there was a vision that the team worked to achieve. Whereas all I got from LBY was that they wanted a moddable game, without much clue about what the characters would be like. I can't imagine that Will Wright would have taken any notice of people who complained that the UI was a colour they didn't like!

Since LBY got cancelled, I think it is time to compare it with Paralives because Paralives excels in a lot of points that LBY got wrong.

As some have pointed out in this thread, LBY does not have a distinct creative direction and a distinct vision. Paralives is bursting with personality in so many points. The animations are great, the visual style is distinct and the characters themselves have emotion in their eyes or, simply said, they are lifelike in their facial expressions. The artstyle is not for everybody, but at least the models are proportional. Therefore, they are easy to animate. The characters in LBY are voiceless which is another thing that breaks the immersion.

LBY tried to be a game for modders while Paralives wants to be a game for players. Rod Humble himself said that LBY can be another Second Life. While having modding tools is great, gameplay is always more important. Additionally, Paralives will have both. The gameplay of Paralives has personality and many complex things and systems were promised by the team. The game will have family gameplay, weather, memories, wants and fears, evolvable personalities, upgradable jobs and schools, together cards and more. LBY showed very little gameplay even though the team was publishing videos about gameplay for months. We have not seen the basics like life stages yet. LBY does not have rabbitholes, but rabbitholes exist because nobody wants to spend their gameplay session in an office.

That is all that I have to say. I do not want to start a war in the community or anything like that. I just want Paradox to learn from their mistakes. LBY had potential, but I think what destroyed the project the most were unrealistic deadlines. It feels like the team was pushed to relase the game earlier than when it should have been relased.

The only competitor I see could make it is paralives, as even inZoi company is being all secretly “say maybe, no tell” about their game. Although to be fair, all seem limited and who knows if any one of them gets close to realising customizable open world sandbox legacy simulator gameplay. Kudos for LBY trying to being outside-the-box, but providing extensive customization and simulation options that even TS4 lacked Hoping PL and InZoi manage to not give up or work forward building a product and not repeat the same mistake as this came to by (I don’t see vivaland being valud competitor as it may have already cancelled also but silently)

The graphics were rough, but I don't think that was the only issue. The gameplay loop itself, living life and interacting with the town and all that? I never got a strong impression about it despite all the gameplay it showed. Yes, there's a lot of moddibility and in a way, it could be fun to create your own gameplay experience out of nothing... but I guess that's not what I was looking for. I like being able to add mods to my game to tweak stuff or add onto existing systems.

But the systems we've seen so far are so barebones. As bare as you can get. The humans didn't look great (and turns out they were Unity assets, and not the good kind). The lighting and textures didn't jive well together and not in a "this is a stylistic choice" kind of way. There comes a point where you won't be able to fix that kind of stuff later down the line, it needs to be somewhat a-ok to start with or else you'll waste a lot of time and money down the road trying to fix it.

Maybe when they all sat in a meeting with each other, it came down to "Can your current team actually fix this, or were you hoping you could just push this out and fix it later maybe if it became a huge hit?" Paradox has tried doing this one too many times at this point, so after CS2, I'm not surprised they turned off a few leaky faucets.

https://www.ign.com/articles/parado...ing-life-by-you
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/life-...-by-you-studio/

Poor Rod Humble.

Apologies for double post but...
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/updat...87303224606720/





Willem did some of the dev videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8IwOPS_kRg

Source for news:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeByYou/comments/1dixrlf

It is weird how they were cancelled. After so much exposure and anticipation. Just before releasing into Early Access. Early Access is not full release and always shows games that are still really rough and sometimes still miss complete features.
The criticism about LBY (to Paralives, not inZOI) was fair too, but imo that fits the narrative when a game is still in such early stage and a lot still has to be done. I still don't really see a reason to cancel it at this stage when looking at what they've made so far. But then, I don't need best graphics.

Nowadays I actually prefer indie games because they often excel in fun gameplay and obviously don't have the funding for AAA graphics. But you'd be surprised how fast you can stop caring about graphics if a game is a lot of fun.

Based on the statement from the dev, they had AA funding not AAA. It's not impossible for indie games to replicate AAA looking realistic graphics but it is NOT easy to do it right. I truly think the team they built for LBY was simply incapable of producing the desired game. I'm sure they were able to build out the systems well enough, but SOME kind of intentional artistic direction was needed and they just didn't have it.

What really baffles me is the decision to stick with these character models which I think created a lot of issues. There are SO Many assets they could've picked from, why choose the anatomically awkward one to start with? They've had so much time to switch out the model assets they were using as well but they stuck with it. I dunno it's just so weird and confusing when that was kinda the main complaint from players.

And the fact that they had 24 people it seems but only 1 (or no) person dedicated to making proper animations? (Though I mean, even with a proper animator the models themselves were a mess so animating them would likely be a headache)

Like, yes, it was releasing in Early Access. People shouldn't have have expected it to be completely polished or perfect and feature complete. BUT.... these are some basic issues people pointed out from the very beginning and I can't help but feel like if at the very least they switched out character models, they would've been better off.

I didn't follow the development of Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 closely, but I remember like there were similarly brutal firings after a period of development (they had already a launch date and trailers, then fired the whole staff and changed the launch date to TBA). True that they didn't drop the game completely, but they seemed to be starting from scratch.

I don't know why they stuck with the character models looking like that. Even I was able to point out the weird animations and shoulders (I am usually very good at ignoring these things). At the same time I have no clue what they were actively working on. Maybe they were working on replacing this, or maybe they simply had trouble finding the talent they needed for this. So, I was willing to wait for this.

I think that anything graphics/animation related is not a reason to scrap a big project, because that can be improved. I keep seeing comments mentioning basic issues, but I did not see basic issues that could not be fixed. To me, the fundamentals of a sims game was there. (free will,skills,traits,jobs,crafting,dialogue,building,decorating, relationships, character creation, travel, economy). I would like someone to point out a feature that was missing/broken and would be impossible to fix properly without starting over.

My confusion is more about the timing of the cancelling. Early Access would've brought in new funds. I've seen Early Access projects before that were a real slow burn, but still became successful. Or games that were not received well, but over time turned it around (some Paradox games even). But only if the developers are giving the opportunity ofc.