Some franchises have achieved such fame that they have become synonymous with a genre. For the life simulation genre, The Sims probably comes to mind. Paradox’s Life By You spent its entire development process and even post-cancellation process being defined as Sims competitor. A recent LinkedIn Post by one of the developers who worked on the game has shed more light on its cancellation. According to Willem Delventhal, the dev team was not informed about the cancellation prior to the public announcement. The developers spent a month in what Delventhal refers to as purgatory trying to find ways to keep the game going.
Delventhal also wished to express his confusion about the game’s cancellation in the face of what seemed to be a major success, at least based on the numbers his team was working with. The internal metric that the team was measuring with was actually surpassed by the team, according to the post. Delventhal also takes the time to stress the importance of indie games in his post, even citing Life By You as an indie response to the Sims. He has also linked Indie Game Academy, a program centered around teaching coding and game design to students, and then hopefully prepping those students to create independent games.
The importance of indie projects like the Indie Game Academy is that they serve as competition and as an answer to studios that produce triple-A titles. Gaming has been having a relatively rough couple of years, ever since the lockdown was lifted and the economic bubble it created in the industry popped as such mass cancellations and layoffs like the ones seen by Paradox aren’t common. While Delventhal portrays the proceedings taken by Paradox with a suspicious perspective, it does reflect the very real instability for many within the industry right now. Hopefully, the strings of mass layoffs might soon be at an end, and indie games might be the way that happens, but only time will tell.