The team was doing extremely well before the game’s termination.
A couple of days ago we wrote the story about Life by You, the planned life simulation game from Paradox Interactive and it’s entire closure of the development project. Shortly after the Paradox Interactive CEO broke the announcement on the Paradox forums was a formal Press Release. Sharing the information that the game development studio Paradox Tectonic, who’s main and only project was Life By You, got shut down entirely.
Paradox Interactive has decided to cease further operations in the wholly owned studio Paradox Tectonic (Tectonic) in Berkeley, California. The studio has since 2019 led the development of the game Life by You, whose release is canceled, and employs 24 people.
This is difficult and drastic news for our colleagues at Tectonic, who’ve worked hard on Life by You’s Early Access release. Sadly, with cancellation of their sole project we have to take the tough decision to close down the studio. We are deeply grateful for their hard work in trying to take Paradox into a new genre, says Fredrik Wester, CEO of Paradox Interactive.
This confirms that the Life By You team, at least for Early Access had employed 24 people who unfortunately will have to look for new open positions and projects now.
How Life by You and Paradox Tectonic closed last minute
According to one of the developers working on the game, the bosses at Paradox Interactive announced the pull in the last minute. In his detailed post on LinkedIn the now-former Life By You developer elaborated about how the video game project got shut down. At least from the developer’s perspective.
First and foremost, nothing expressed here represents the sentiments of Paradox Interactive or Paradox Tectonic. These are my thoughts and my thoughts alone.
I’ve known for some time that we might be getting shut down. We were actively working on a hyper-moddable life sim called Life By You. An indie answer to the aging IP that is the Sims but instead focussed heavily on UGC.
And as far as it goes, we were doing *extremely well.*
I cannot share specific numbers, but I can say that we had an internal metric we were aiming for that had been approved, and that we exceeded that number by a significant portion. We also got a thumbs up a few weeks before launch.
Then two weeks before launch we were told we wouldn’t be launching. And just now that we’ve all lost our jobs. We were only informed of this via a public announcement.
We were not told why. Instead we spent a month in purgatory, and did everything we could to prove to them we were worth launching, including things like finding potential buyers or suggesting cutting ties and going indie. We heard virtually nothing back.
According to the dev, there were internal plans to salvage the project and publish it under an indie label. Still, the Paradox Interactive team gave no reply and decided to continue with the decision to shut down the game and studio.
“To be honest, I have guesses about what happened.” – said the former Life By You developer. “And while I can’t conjecture, I’m sure you have guesses too. As a business owner, some of them are understandable, but many of them are not. We were a strong team on a strong project ready to launch to a strong audience.“
Even though Life By You was internally passing all the green marks and prepared well throughout for the first Early Access release, the executives didn’t share the sentiment and removed the game from the release map without notifying its developers on time. Even though there was some suspicion before about how the project could fail, it still surprised many of the developers with the way the announcement got carried out.
As for now, there are still a few other life simulation games waiting for its release date. Paralives, InZOI and The Sims 5 / Project Rene have a confirmed trajectory of coming out sometime in the future. With The Sims 4 still pushing new DLC content for 10 years now.
What are your thoughts about the cancellation of Life By You and the Paradox Tectonic studio? Share your input in the comments down below!
News tip: PCGamer
