Life By You, a formerly-upcoming Sims rival, was supposed to be out in Early Access on June 4. It didn't make it. Two weeks after that missed deadline it was cancelled entirely, before the public even got a chance to test it, and now a day later the news is out that the entire studio behind it has been shut down.
I know I mentioned some of this briefly in an update to my original "Paradox, What Are You Doing?" post, but that was a story mostly about the company's doomed attempts at publishing external games. Given this is a result of Paradox's internal struggles I wanted to break this news out into its own blog.
Paradox Tectonic was opened by its Swedish parent company back in March 2019, expressly to develop this game. This is the part of the article where I stress that the broader outcomes here are nothing new, that studio closures linked to game cancellations have long been part of this industry, as has been laying off workers when their work on a game is finished. I'm not saying that's right, just that there's precedent for it.
But those moves have traditionally come when a game is out and has, by whatever metric, failed. Or, at the other end of the scale, when a game fails to get off the ground earlier in development, and a publisher decides to cut its losses, or as it would probably say, "reallocate resources". To commit five years of work, to build an entire company around the goal of producing a single game, and then throw it all in the bin just days before it was supposed to come out is a whole new level of ineptitude that's particularly cruel, even by this industry's cruel-by-default standards.
My original Paradox post targeted their publishing arm because, over the last couple of years, it's been the most public example of the company stepping on rake after rake after rake. But to silo those publishing woes is to excuse some of Paradox's other internal missteps which, and stop me if you've heard this before, can mostly be traced back to their decision to go public in 2016, a move that saw the company rapidly transition from the makers of some excellent (albeit niche) strategy games into...whatever it is now.
Paradox Tectonic is the perfect case study for this. Formed in 2019, it had one job: take on The Sims, a game that has for decades remained largely unchallenged in the genre it created. So they hired Rod Humble--former head of The Sims at EA!--and got to work. For years the team chipped away at EA's colossus, through a global pandemic, then after a global pandemic, to the point where on June 4--that's June 4, 2024, just days ago--it was meant to come out in Early Access and be played by fans around the world.
The reasons given for first its delay and then its ultimate cancellation are basically that Paradox, just days before the game's public release, didn't just realise that the game wasn't great, but that it was so busted that it could never be great:
...when we come to a point where we believe that more time will not get us close enough to a version we would be satisfied with, then we believe it is better to stop. This is obviously tough and disappointing for everyone who poured their time and enthusiasm into this project, especially when our decision comes so late in the process.
That's wild. What the fuck was happening there? Who had been overseeing development for those five years, to see its Early Access delayed twice already, then have it get to the point it was finally days away that release, only for someone else to swoop in and say it was so bad it needed to be cancelled? That's a level of ineptitude that I can't remember ever seeing at this end of the business before. Releasing a bad game then trying to fix it with updates is one thing, as is cancelling a bad game much earlier in development. But this? This speaks to something being very wrong at the highest levels of Paradox, especially when the affected workers reportedly only found out through a public announcement.
Something the company even admitted in Life By You's cancellation! Saying the late decision was "a clear failure on Paradox’s part to meet both our own and the community's expectations", deputy CEO Mattias Lilja put on record:
Games are difficult to get right, and we’ll definitely make mistakes, which, as these things go, always become painfully apparent in hindsight, but still shouldn’t reach this kind of magnitude regardless. We have to take a long and hard look at what led us here and see what changes we have to make to become better.
They absolutely do, if only so something of this magnitude never happens again. Which, of course, will come too late for the workers at Paradox Tectonic, who once again find themselves on the wrong end of a power imbalance that has hit the video game industry especially hard over the last 12 months: it was Paradox's executives who dropped the ball here, but it's the workers at Tectonic--days away from having their game released--who have paid the price.
