So oft do we discuss the machinations of the titans of our industry it can sometimes escape mind that the backbone of gaming is more commonly everything but. The indies, the AA's- those who entreat the niches of our niche and not just the big crowd seekers that seek the every expanding splash. And admits them there is none that I am coming to respect ever more in my advancing years than Paradox- a publisher who exists to squirm annoying in the face of those that insist gaming is and always has been solely for children. (Yes, I read that Metro article- inflammatory and reductive though it was.) Theirs has been the realm of 4X tactics games, Simulation titles, city builders and maybe even a life sim if we lived on a different timeline. But alas- that particular cancellation is the topic of today.
Life by You was the topic of many a thought piece not that long following their rather sudden cancellation just a few short weeks before the supposed launch of their Early Access- and in that void questions have sprung up as hearts sored for what they never had. Personally I saw Life By You as little more than an overly ambitious pipedream fed out of a little bit of a ropey-looking Unity project- but in hindsight I came to appreciate the spirit of what the game promised which everyone else seemed to grasp so much more readily. It wasn't about the individual quality, but having the desire to try and challenge and remake the stagnant life sim genre- wresting a monopoly out of the hands of Sims 4- a game which disappointed in scope back when it first launched- let alone to this day!
But how does a game go along the track to imminent publishing before getting pulled out from under someone like that- to such a rapid degree that even the development studio didn't expect it? Following the cancellation a lot of questions hovered around regarding the game, why it was canned- even by the developers themselves! Well, that was before they, Tectonic, were shut down by Paradox in a move which I think can only be described as 'shocking'. Then again, with the space of hindsight, I suppose Tectonic were founded with the sole goal of creating Life By You, therefore without it there's no objective reason to keep them around- but outside of objectivity it's just kind of a dismissive way to treat your studios. As though we don't already have enough systemic wrestles with self worth in this day and age- you know?
Now I think a lot of unfortunate circumstances have come crashing together for Paradox of late, creating a kind-of miasma of despair they've unfortunately fallen prey to. I'm talking about the general dissatisfaction with City Skylines 2- the complete and utter failure of Lamplighters league, (Wait, that was a Tactics title? Like X-Com style tactics? Might have to check that one out...) Oh, and then there was the split with Double Elven- creators of the cult classic 'Prison Architect' (A game I tried desperately to get into several times) causing the sequel to be delayed into eternity. This has been a bad year for the company all around- and I hate to see it because honest- at their best Paradox published titles hit the kind of itch no-one else can. Stellaris, Crusader Kings the first City Skylines- I love those games for what they are. I'd hate for their publisher to find themselves in jeopardy.
Paradox Interactive recently went in front of their investors to be appropriately upfront about what they see as being 'the problem'. Overconfidence, in a word. The deputy CEO spins a tale about going into projects too hard, investing early in ideas that might have ended up not panning out the way they wanted them to and this feeds into a lot of problems we see effecting the industry at large. Bigger teams with longer tails end up circling the wagons more on simple tasks. We've recently been inundated with excerpts from Jason Schierer's upcoming book on Blizzard that relay similar confusions, where team members end up working on assets that had been completed by someone else months prior. Even just arguing about the direction of a game can hold of months of pay, muddy an idea or entrench viewpoints that fail to reflect the realities of the outside world. Long story short- it's tough out there for scaling up production.
For Paradox it seems they claim their confidence applied blinders, maybe something akin to the sunk cost fallacy, where ideas that really weren't working were allowed to fester because to say otherwise would be to admit having wasted time and money. That explains how a Life by You would have made it all the way to the week before launch until someone sat back and went "This game really isn't going to do well at launch". It sounds harsh, but bare in mind Paradox recently went through City Skylines 2- a game which had the entire genre-type in a chokehold during marketing only to realise as a poor shell of the original title that sought innovations in areas that few to no player really appreciated in exchange for taking liberties in places that players really cared about- such as accessible performance. Skylines still has a sore reputation in the community after years and that rubs off on the developer and the publisher- maybe Paradox saw the exact same situations approaching with Life By You.
Of course we're never going to get specifics, that would be 'unprofessional' or something- but you don't really need everything written in bold ink to figure the heart of it all. We hear about them 'trusting the devs' before realising "Everything will be worse if we keep going, so we have to stop." It seems a good guess was made by the community in the assumption that the cost required to make this game a true competitor to Sims 4 was more than the publishers realised that they could fund- and in the current state the Early Access would embarrass more than it would impress. And that's a really hard thing to see from the inside looking out, to be honest. Getting to that point requires some real introspection that can become muddied in the big picture of a team project.
Where they are right now, Paradox has really burnt up a lot of that consumer trust they had- which is significant given how much a publisher their size relies on that trust. Sure, on one hand you might argue they have a stranglehold on games of this type built to this size, but on the other- a lot of their popular titles are enfranchised. All those popular hitters I named are years old supported by infrequent DLC drops, you can't really support a growing publisher off of that. You need new games that people buy, expanded IPs, eggs in more baskets. But as I said for 343, recognising the problem is the first step to fixing it- and I hope Paradox really knock it out the park in the years to come because, to be honest, their a unique little star in our industry I want to see shine more.
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