Life by You seemed poised to corner an untapped market—that corner being a version of the Sims not . As PCG's Joshua Wolens noted during a , it was angled to be "Sims with the brakes cut".
Unfortunately, that didn't materialise. A mere month after without a new date, Paradox released a that the game would forevermore. In the announcement, the company argued that "the road leading to a release that we felt confident about was far too long and uncertain." Within a day, Paradox Tectonic—the division of Paradox making the thing—was .
However, a former developer from Paradox Tectonic alleges a very different story. In a lengthy , Willem Delventhal, a former designer at the studio, says that the game was doing "extremely well" before Paradox delayed it. His team had an "internal metric" that they were outperforming—and were given a "thumbs up a few weeks before launch", which made the alleged rugpull [[link]] all the more confusing: "Two weeks before launch, we were told we wouldn't be launching."
Delventhal adds that the team was "not told why. Instead we spent a month in purgatory, and did everything we could to prove to them we were worth launching … We heard virtually nothing back." In the post, he also mentions that when the executioner's axe finally swung, its developers were "only informed of this via a public announcement".
This, naturally, paints a bafflingly contradictory picture. Having read the official statement, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Life by You was struggling to stumble over the finish line—but if the team had internal metrics, and it was [[link]] beating them? That's a head-scratcher.