In Life by You, players will create humans and live out their lives without loading screens.

Life by You allows players to design and live out the lives of the humans that they create in an open game world where everything is customizable. Players create their households, build their homes and tell life’s many stories. With real language conversation and the ability to switch from third-person to direct control gameplay, players will connect with their humans on an emotional level. A wide variety of Creator Tools and Editors will allow players to tweak every aspect of their experience, giving them the ability to live life to the fullest - or break the rules, as they see fit. 

Life by You is developed by Paradox Tectonic, a game development studio formed in 2019 by Paradox Interactive. Paradox Tectonic is led by Rod Humble, and made up of veteran game development talent dedicated to building games that enable creativity, freedom, emotion, and sharing. The studio is committed to working with the players, making Life by You’s Early Access a shared experience where the community’s feedback will impact on priorities, content ideas, and development as the team brings the game to full-launch. 

Originally scheduled for September 2023, then pushed until March 5th, delayed until June 4th, and most recently moved to an undetermined date, it may come as no surprised that Paradox today decided to cancel Life by You.

Hi all,

Sadly, we’ve decided to cancel the release of our long-awaited life sim Life by You. This was an incredibly difficult call to make and is a clear failure on Paradox’s part to meet both our own and the community's expectations. We realize this raises some large questions; here we hope to shed at least some light on why we opted to cancel, rather than delay as we communicated earlier.

Life by You has been in the works for a long time and we’ve been very excited about the promise and the potential of this game. Our hope was always that it would be able to leave a mark in this exciting and new genre for us. That’s why we’ve opted to delay it twice, to give the studio and the game a fair shot at realizing the potential we saw. For each delay we made, we've seen incremental improvements, which in hindsight may well have led us to focus on details rather than the whole picture.

A few weeks back, we decided to hold off on an Early Access release in order to re-evaluate Life by You, as we still felt that the game was lacking in some key areas. Though a time extension was an option, once we took that pause to get a wider view of the game, it became clear to us that the road leading to a release that we felt confident about was far too long and uncertain. This is not to say the game has not shown any promising qualities; Life by You had a number of strengths and the hard work of a dedicated team that went into realizing them. However, 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.

At the end of the day, our job is to release games that are fun, interesting, and challenging for our players, and our every decision should be taken with that purpose in mind. When we get that right, we earn our pay. So, how do we ensure we don’t find ourselves here again? Honestly, there are no real guarantees. 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. In the end, our mission remains the same, and we’ll continue to take whatever steps we need to do just that.

Sincerely,
Mattias Lilja, Deputy CEO of Paradox Interactive

Key Features:

• Play in an open world: Live life with no loading screens. Strike up real-language conversations. Drive or bike to the countryside. Discover and complete quests to unlock new experiences. 
• Expand your creativity: Make your own in-game content through mods. Utilize a variety of deep Creator Tools. Change the gameplay anytime. Life is yours to make.
• Take direct control: Drag and drop your humans into their place - or drive them directly in third-person mode. Live the life of one or tell the stories of many. Climb a career ladder. Fall in love. Raise a family. 
• Tell stories through conversations: Every real-language conversation is generated based on your human’s unique situation. You can even craft your own conversations in-game.
• Design your own world: Build your humans’ dream homes or businesses from scratch. Furnish them from top to bottom, inside to outside. Drag, demolish, and rearrange entire towns.
• Create fully customized humans: Design your families in the Human Creator, including deep personality and character traits. Style and restyle your humans at any time.

Life by You will be available in Early Access on June 4, 2024 through Steam and Epic Games Store at 39.99USD / 39.99 EUR / 34.99 GBP.