Death by Paradox

 

If there's one thing about the whole life cycle of Life By You taught me- it's that after all these decades under the degradation of the EA hammer- people really want a competitor to the Sims brand. I guess it's something you never really think about if you've fallen off from caring about that franchise ever since EA decided to turn it into a simulator game for how many inconsequential pieces of nothing they tacked onto the product with a hefty pricetag. The bloat has gotten so ridiculous it's now a mental hurdle for new people coming to the game simply looking at the insane price to have at everything on offer and deciding- "you know what? I don't want that smoke!" The average consumer, and even the entrenched life simulation enthusiast, seems to have finally gotten around to the truth that if literally anyone else could scour some ground in this market- maybe things would be just that little bit more equitable on the consumer's side. Just a tiny bit.

The reason I know that so well is because when Life By You was first announced it looked like total crap and no one can convince me otherwise. Seriously, just look at it! Life By You seemed every bit the under-realised starter Unity project back when it's in those pre-Alpha stages of trying to figure out the bare basic idea of what it is you're even doing. Everything, from the character models to the UI looked placeholder- and it's only by merit of the publishers involved that I didn't immediately take it for another overly ambitious nowhere project helmed by a team of first time coders. Paradox's name alone was the only thing that led this game announcement any ounce of legitimacy in my wary eyes. But when you're just hungry for a competitor- you look past the face and see the heart.

Life By You promised full world simulation, instead of the aggressively regressive 'single plot' simulation that The Sims 4 has confusingly peddled for so very long now. Itself an absolutely humongous leap back from The Sims 3's simulation efforts which allowed people to wonder the whole neighbourhood if they felt like it. Of course, LBY promised to take things one step further by having all the town be playable on a whim, so that if one families' plight began to bore you could switch to see what the bickering couple down the road's life is like. That kind of seamless connectivity would obviously be impossible in the direction that the Sims went, making a genuine opportunity for more of the ultimate 'life sim' fantasy to be fulfilled. 

But then the game did also throb with an air of the overambitious too. There were those typical overreaches of promise that boasted more of insane propositions rather than legitimate possibilities. NPCs taking off their clothes and then leaving them on the ground to be interacted as objects? That is an insane level of dynamic deformation values that would need to be applied on every errant piece of clothing at all times- for a seemingly inconsequential feature. How about cutting flowers in a garden and then putting those flowers in a vast? Innocent enough, until you learn that was supposed to be tracked the entire way from the ground to the vase. This is 'watching an acorn turn into a tree' from the Original Fable all over again!

Still- I guess I speak ill of the dead with all this rambling because wouldn't you know it- despite the hype and the anticipation- Life By You was unceremoniously killed, axed, cancelled- by Paradox Interactive themselves. The game had been scheduled to go onto early access just a few weeks beforehand, it missed that deadline and then wiped it's slate totally clean but a stone's throw later. (Damn, I didn't Paradox was run by the Japanese Train board!) Now this pretty much came right out of nowhere as not enough eyes were on this game for media feelers to be out there. No trickle of troubled development scenarios managed to make it's way to the headlines and this all spiralled out of control before anyone outside really knew what was happening.

Now we have retrospectives from the now defunct studio, yes they killed the studio as well, telling us just some small measure of the puzzle- and the conclusions we can draw are... puzzling. William Delventhal posted his testimony to Linkedin on the matter, claiming that the game was actually coming together well and the milestones they had set for themselves seemed to have been approved by Paradox until suddenly they weren't anymore. The Early Access was cancelled for them, and with the same public announcement that the rest of us heard- the team lost their jobs. (Which is never going to be anything but the worst way to close a studio. Do you have so little respect for your own staff that you can't even break the news to them personally before airing it out for all the world to see and natter on? It's just a gross, yet common, practice.)

So everything was going well? In a situation like this it seems literally no one holds the answers aside from the suits themselves and all we can do is speculate amongst ourselves about a situation that seems to make no earthly sense. They had the tools to challenge the Sims, even to some small degree, and if that ultimately hadn't worked out for them then at least the attempt would have been made! Apparently the team seems to think what they had was above the minimum threshold to early launch, but someone higher was apparently playing on a totally different board. Maybe someone was looking at the roadmap to totally finish the game and just thought the expense wouldn't be worth the cost, or that the reputational hit of failure would be worse than that of giving up now. (To which most conventional logic would insist is demonstrably untrue.)

Whatever the case it leaves us with the situation where EA's ant farm life-sim has won again without lifting a finger. Top god without making any concession, without fighting for their audience and without learning any valuable lessons about value propositions. I won't pretend to have been a diehard supporter of Life By You- but I like the potential of life sims and was really excited for the future back in the days of Sims 3. Now the genre has stagnated, and apparently the barrier to break in is so overwhelming that a publisher seemingly designed for the sole purpose of developing titles for this kind of crowd- long form deep focus style games, can't take the risk. Can't wait for Sims 5 where EA starts charging us for slots to maintain simultaneous households! (I'm only half joking- I bet they've at least considered that.)