Sims competitor Life by You has been canceled

The biggest tragedy is when these projects aren't opened up for the community. OSS would welcome this immensely.

Although I'd love to see that happen more frequently, this is simply not realistically doable for most commercial games.

Almost all of them use licensed third-party libraries which are integrated deeply into the game's code base, but which can't legally be distributed as part of an open source project. So in order to be able to open source a modern commercial game, you'd have to put in quite a lot of work finding all of your code integrating with commercial libraries and either replacing or removing it. And if that's not enough, you'd probably have to have your (expensive) legal team check the entire code base for any infringements just to be on the safe side.

All that work for no monetary gain just isn't a very good business case. So, unfortunately, I wouldn't expect a lot of modern games to be open sourced any time soon.
- And assets, don't forget assets. If you use any bought assets from assets stores (Unity / Unreal, heck even textures from textures.com), the licenses don't allow you to redistribute those in raw form.
  
  Even if you're using only things you have copyright to, it's still not a good idea to license it under same terms as code. Code licenses =/= art licenses

It's kind of wild that the game went from being 4 months away, to a year away, to cancelled. I was very willing to believe they just needed more time. I'm used to thinking that if a game is at the point where the studio is advertising it for release in a few months, it's impossible that the project would get completely shitcanned. Why were they advertising it and putting up a steam store page if it was still so up in the air?

Is Paradox doing okay? They own several franchises I care quite deeply about so I certainly hope this is a good decision cut their losses and not deliver a dud and not cost cutting to shore up worsening finances

They're doing fine. They're publicly traded, so you can see their financial reports (2023 financial summary here). Their stock isn't doing so great though, but it seems cyclical.

I've been reading their dev diaries about what's most likely EUV, and it looks awesome.

An entire simulated town that you interact with and take part in still sounds like a pretty fun idea. I know it's not the same genre but I hope Streets of Fortuna can pull it off.

Sims 3 tried to approximate that, though in reality Sims that you couldn't see around at the moment had a very simple alternate simulation instead of the full sim for those you were watching.

The illusion mostly worked and you technically had a full seamless small town you could visit and interact directly with.

Sims 3 was also an unstable nightmare, but it was made for what is now 15-year-old hardware and, I assume, held together with shoestrings.

They got rid of the seamless part in 4, instead splitting the world in tiny groups of a couple buildings each, meaning even EA probably thought the open town was too much trouble. Too bad because the separate blocks are a lot more boring too... Like most of the Sims 4 really.

I think sims player are desperate enough to have paid $ 80 for this game in pre-alpha.

Just add mod support and release it unfinished. It’s Paradox - a triple A studio - it’s expected to be a buggy, unfinished mess.

That's kind of like Tiny Life. It is similar to the Sims but with retro graphics. Lots of people bought it as soon as it hit early access when a lot of core things were missing.
- Kinda looks like Project Zomboid, but without zombies. /s

I was cautiously optimistic about this enough to wishlist it, damn RIP

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The game, which was first revealed in 2023, sounded impressive: it was designed to allow for the entire town to be simulated in real-time and have no loading screens.

However, based on a forum post by Paradox’s deputy CEO Mattias Lilja, the game had some issues that may not have been easily fixable even with additional time for development.

“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,” Lilja says.

“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.”

Lilja says that the game “had a number of strengths,” but the company realized that “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.”

The game’s initial early access launch had been set for September 2023, but it was pushed to March 2024, then June, and then delayed indefinitely in May before being officially canceled.

The original article contains 292 words, the summary contains 218 words. Saved 25%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!