It’s officially November 2024, and in a year when we were supposed to have at least two contenders vying for The Sims’ life simulation throne, EA’s long-running series continues to stand alone—with Paradox’s Life by You brutally cancelled at the finish line, and Krafton’s Inzoi delayed to March 28 next year.

I struggle to think of any other series that has gone nearly 25 years nigh uncontested, and yet The Sims continues to reign purely by virtue of being the only one of its kind. This was supposed to be the year of a new generation of life sims giving EA a run for its money, dammit! But it’s not, and I’m beginning to wonder if it’ll ever happen.

The barren landscape persists in spite of the fact that there’s clearly a hunger for competition—I’ve made my own frustrations with EA’s handling of The Sims 4 very well known at this point, fellow Sims sicko Lauren Morton echoes a ton of my feelings on where the series is at and where its heading, and half the community seems to be exasperated with the state of things at this point.

So, how are we even here and is it still worth pinning our hopes on the remaining upcomers lurking on the sidelines?

A gargantuan task

If there’s one thing I’ve come to learn this year, it’s this: Life sims are hard to make. Like, really hard. Ex-Sims head and director of Life by You Rod Humble said as much to PC Gamer earlier this year. “I think people who don’t play life simulators perhaps don’t understand that these are the most complex RPGs ever written, as well as being some of the most complex crafting games ever written, as well as being the most complex behavioural AI systems ever written.”

Inzoi director Hyungjun Kim had a similar sentiment when I spoke to him at Gamescom, pointing out to me just how many moving parts go into every simple action. A simple tweak here can break a whole multitude of code there. Sure, that’s true for all games, but I feel like it’s even more noticeable and damaging in the life sim space where so many elements are interconnected.

Hell, keeping all the wheels turning smoothly is an issue that continues to plague The Sims, which has almost three decades of knowledge attached to it. It’s no wonder that it appears to be a struggle for developers trying to enter that space, even when you’ve got folk like Humble with first-hand experience at the helm.

With how tough-going it seems to be, I have to wonder if scope is part of a wider issue here. Life by You originally posited itself as “one of the most moddable and open life-simulator games” ever made with “unprecedented freedom of expression.” That’s a pretty big task to do from the ground-up, especially with a 24-person team.

Despite the odds, though, Paradox Tectonic was on the brink of a release. A real, tangible, playable product that was apparently all but ready to ship after several years in development and a couple of delays. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, in what former developer Willem Delventhal referred to as having “the rug pulled,” Life by You was donezo. Cancelled, never to be released, and Paradox Tectonic was shuttered hours later.

It’s still difficult to piece together exactly why. Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja had said the publisher “felt that the game was lacking in some key areas,” before concluding that “the road leading to a release that we felt confident about was far too long and uncertain.” It was a strange, almost backhanded statement, going out of its way to praise Paradox Tectonic for its work and innovation while also essentially saying that what they had produced simply wasn’t good enough.

The confusion persisted when Deventhal claimed that, in the weeks running up to Life by You’s short-notice delay and subsequent cancellation, the team was exceeding expectations. He claimed the game was doing “extremely well” prior to the delay, was beating internal metrics, and that the team were given a “thumbs up a few weeks before launch.”

Lilja even said that given the opportunity, Paradox would do Life by You again “but in a different way,” feeding into my scope-related concerns by adding “it should just start smaller.” Unreleased screenshots dropped by a handful of developers in August showed a game that had come a long way from its initial trailer, even looking better than official screenshots, and I was getting the impression that Paradox Tectonic had put an awful lot of thought and care into making Life by You a game worth paying attention to.

Even though the cancellation happened back in June, I’m still feeling pretty burned by it. Life by You was looking like the closest thing we would get to a Sims-competitive experience, with a little less scale and a little more tweakability. It appeared to offer an alternative for life sim sickos (me) who are fed up with a handful of genre elements only persisting in cosy farming games (also me).

It’s not dag dag just yet

Of course, Life by You’s ruthless canning hasn’t dried up the pool of potentials entirely. I’ve been turning my attention towards Inzoi alongside most other fans. It’s shaping up to be a more realistic offering than both EA and Paradox’s attempts, with some staggeringly pretty graphics I fear will age like milk after several years and some meta narrative on you essentially being the god overseeing the Zois’ day-to-day lives.

Throw in a slightly bizarre morality system where Zois apparently can’t go to heaven if they lead a bad life, and it’s just different enough to keep me interested while reeling me in with all that life sim familiarity. We’ve heard surprisingly little about it so far, though. There’ve been a handful of interviews, a character creator demo, and a gameplay booth at Gamescom back in August, but I still don’t fully understand what Inzoi is as a complete concept.

Despite a Krafton representative telling PC Gamer that the game was still on track for its 2024 early access release in late October, it did a cheeky 180 two weeks later to announce its delay into March 2025 with a strange statement I can only attribute to the whimsy of machine translation: “It is said that among primates, raising a human child to adulthood takes the longest time because humans must be prepared to endure and adapt to their ever-changing surroundings. The extra love and care that is required to properly nurture a child is how I see our journey with Inzoi—a game that we will be nurturing together from its Early Access birth.”

I mean, hey, it’s not the Paradox rug pull yet, but from the bits and pieces I know about Inzoi I can only assume development is proving to be mighty demanding. I wouldn’t be surprised if the early access build ends up releasing without some of its touted features, like the “3D printer” mode which uses AI to transform images into in-game furniture items.

To be fair to Inzoi, this is the first time Krafton has actually announced any kind of delay for it, though admittedly it was stuck in “2024” obscurity before then. It was our last bastion for any real Sims competition this year, and to see the goalpost moved does sting a little bit.

I do have my reservations after playing it at Gamescom, though. It seemed to share many of the same behavioural issues that The Sims does—issues with pathing, stacking actions and simply getting two people to interact with each other in a timely manner. It’s pretty, sure, but I was feeling a lack of substance in any meaningful gameplay. I did also only get to play the thing for about 45 minutes which any life sim enjoyer will know is barely enough time to even get out of the character creator.

Life (sim) will change

So what, is that it? Is Inzoi our only alternative? Thankfully no, but the remaining options continue to linger in uncertain territory. Paralives is the indie answer to The Sims, which has been in development by Alex Massé (now alongside a small team) since the beginning of 2019. It’s been slowly chugging along on Patreon in the years since and is currently targeting a vague 2025 release, though that could be anywhere from two to fourteen months from now.

It does look pretty damn solid from the sprinkling of gameplay videos I’ve seen. I’m yet to cough up for Patreon to get a peek behind the curtain, but it’s done a bang-up job of maintaining the positive momentum it’s had since its initial reveal. The Paralives team also committed to free expansions and no paid DLC for its entire duration earlier this year, so we’ll see how that holds up once the game is out of the gate.

Finally, there’s a not-so-secret third option in Midsummer Studios’ currently unnamed project. The studio is headed up by Jake Solomon—yes, the very non-Sims XCOM 2 and Marvel’s Midnight Suns bloke—who told PC Gamer he wants to make something akin to a relationship simulator filled with Gilmore Girls-style small town drama. Now to be fair, this does seem to be more rigidly narrative-driven than a full sandbox style, but given how scarce our choices are right now, I’ll certainly take it.

So 2024 may not have been the year for breakout life sims shaking up the genre. Am I sad about that? Well, yeah, especially when it looks like EA is ending The Sims as we know it, with no Sims 5 and a somewhat muddied idea of how Project Rene will act as the next generation of the series. It feels bizarre to continue to be trapped in this cycle of unsuccessful usurpers, given how feral half of us seem to be just to have something goddamn different. Something to kick EA up its understandably-yet-frustratingly comfy arse and say “Hey! You’re not the only one anymore!” Something to make me excited about this genre again, and all the ridiculous ways it can be spun and moulded.

Now, two contenders threaten the lone behemoth in 2025. Will one of them finally emerge to fight? I sure hope so, victorious or otherwise.