With early access forLife by Youintended to open on June 4, fans of the life simulation genre have been tittering with nervous excitement. The game’s publisher, Paradox, has been distributing codes to content creators in the previous weeks, and they’ve been pumping out content showing off the game before public access was to be unlocked.
When I looked up the launch date to cite in the article I was going to write today, I almost didn’t click “An Update on ‘Life by You’ Release Date.” “Old news,” I told myself as I scrolled past it through preview footage and press releases about the upcoming launch, with the game having been delayed twice before. That is, until I noticed the “20 Hours Ago” timestamp on the article and sighed.
Unlike the last two pauses, though,Paradox isn’t guessing when early access will actually be ready to go. Reactions to the news are mixed, ranging from relief that the game will have more time to become better, to frustration that the game’s launch has now been delayed a third time. Life sim fans were eager to finally get their hands on the first ofa few upcoming direct competitors to The Sims, a game so legendary it’s become synonymous with the genre.
It Can’t Be Better Than The Sims If It’s Not Good To Begin With
Players have been vocally opposed to the direction of The Sims over the last decade. WhenThe Sims 4launched in September 2014, it was missing several iconic features (pools, toddlers, and ghosts, to name a few), but despite this, it launched with a “deluxe” edition with a price markup that was only good for getting you some extra furniture in the game. Developer EA put out a free patch that implemented some (but not all) of the missing features just before releasing the first full-price expansion, Get to Work, which was fine at best and boring at worst.
EA made The Sims 4 base game free-to-play a few years back, but that was not out of the goodness of the corporation’s heart. It’s like a sample at a grocery store – they’re not giving you a snack because they think you might be hungry; they’re hoping people will buy the product because they enjoyed the free sample. And with the move to free-to-play came 16 million new players – that’s a lot of eyes on the in-game shop. But content keeps launching with game-breaking bugs and whole focal point features that don’t even work when you attempt to play with them (looking at you, My Wedding Stories). Nowadays, buying additional content for The Sims 4 feels like splurging for a whole container of that sample product from the store, only to get home and realize that half the product is missing and that whatisthere doesn’t taste quite right.
Fans of the genre have been chomping at the bit tosee games like Life by You and similar competitive titles thrivebecause of this anti-EA sentiment. Except, when we got to see some of the preview content for the upcoming early access launch for Life by You, people weren’t thrilled with what they saw there, either. Fans criticized the character models, the atmosphere, the controls, and it seems like, unlike EA, Paradox actually listened when fans point out that something is amiss.
Some people are worried now, with Paradox’s matter-of-fact tonein the announcementand relative silence on the matter since. There’s fear that the game will be canceled outright now. I disagree and hopefully won’t have to eat those words in a few months’ time. As someone who’s been playing The Sims for more than two decades, who’s watched the series get watered down and diced into tiny unimpressive little chunks since The Sims 4’s middling decade-long reign began in 2014, I’m willing to wait for Life by You to be good.
Delaying Into Competitor Launches
The delay, however, means that Life by You’s launch will likely bump into those of its competitors – Paralives, Inzoi, and more that have hinted at early 2025 launches. But though it had the advantage of launching first of the bunch, launching in a rough and unfinished state would have been a bad move. With so many other titles like it on the menu for the next few years, an unsatisfying early access launch could have made it difficult to corral people back into Paradox’s corner later on.
Besides, if something is going to make Life by You stand out in the list of Sims-inspired titles coming out soon, then it’s better to have time to let the developers implement that. I wrote recently about how Idon’t normally like Metroidvanias but loved Animal Wellbecauseit was something different, and that game took seven years to launch. When it did, though, it swiftly and immediately established itself as what might be the indie gem of 2024.
Life by You doesn’t have the juggernaut status that The Sims has, which tends to make players more forgiving of its sins. What it has is a premise that hopes to compete, but if its launch wasn’t going to meet that goal, whynotpush it back? Better a late game that’s fully cooked than one that’s been yanked out of the oven prematurely for the sake of being the first dish on the dinner table.
