'GTA 6 meets The Sims' Life By You cancelled out of the blue

When Life by You was announced in March 2023 by publisher Paradox Interactive, it caught fans of the life sim genre by surprise with its blend of EA’s The Sims and Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto series.

Paradox Interactive is perhaps best known for other titles including the likes of Cities: Skylines II, Prison Architect and Empire of Sin, to name a few. It’s published a ton of successful strategy games and it was perhaps hoping that Life by You would be its biggest hit yet.

Check out the Life by You trailer below!

Life by You, which was set to release via Steam early access this year on PC, wants gamers to: “Be in total control of the humans that you create, the towns that you build, the stories that you tell. We know life is always better with a heavy sprinkle of your imagination, so we’re empowering you with a wide variety of Creator Tools so you can design your lives the way you see fit - or break the rules of life itself.”

There was no full release date announced for Life by You, but regardless, there would have been plenty of The Sims fans looking forward to this new take on the life-sim genre with a sprinkle of GTA. Sadly, that time will not arrive after Life by You has been unceremoniously cancelled out of the blue.

In a telling statement issued on the official Paradox forum, the deputy CEO at Paradox Interactive, Mattias Lilja announced the disappointing news. Naturally, fans replied on the forum with a lot of disappointment.

“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,” said Lilja. “We realise 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.”

In a nutshell, Life by You, a game that has already had its early access launch delayed at least twice has been outright cancelled due to the developer's lack of confidence in delivering a game that will meet the expectations of their vision.

“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,” the CEO concluded. “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.”

“Damn that sucks, EA really needs some competition for The Sims,” replied a member of the forum thread. “Very sad, I wanted this to be something great,” exclaimed another.

So there you have it, the promising rival to EA’s The Sims, Life by You has been cancelled as it rides off into the sunset leaving gamers wondering what could have been.