Paradox would still make a life sim 'but a different way', even after cancelling Life By You.

After a turbulent period marked by cancellations, delays and developer changes, Paradox Interactive is looking to get back to its roots, focusing on what it does best: games. RPGs such as Bloodlines 2 will be out, at least once it launches next year. But life simulations are still popular despite the problems with Life By You.

In a wide-ranging, in-depth interview, Mattias Lilja, deputy CEO, tells me, "We could do it again, but in a different manner." We should try it. "It should start small."

Henrik Fahraeus is Paradox's Chief Creative Officer. "I think that the idea of making a life simulation makes perfect sense. It would fit perfectly into the pillars. It could be Paradox's take on the life simulation."

It's a shock because Life By You was cancelled so abruptly. Life By You, unlike Bloodlines 2, was not given many chances in the last five years. It went from being delayed indefinitely to being cancelled in just one month.

Lilja says, "We considered all options." "That's the reason we took a break first, and then I think a month later, we canceled it. We spent a whole month trying to figure out how to do this. What are our options? We didn't see any options, so we ended up where we are. We may never return to it, or do something similar. But we don't currently have the options to do so.

Fahraeus's picture is that there were simply too many problems. "We saw many issues with this feature, graphics, that it is glitchy and that it doesn't work." The bigger problem was that, as a game, it didn't compare to the competition. "We finally realized that this game is not better than the competition in any way... there is nothing here that is actually superior."

After the cancellation, a former designer at Paradox Tectonic claimed that Life By You had been going well for a long time before Paradox delayed the game, and that the team "outperformed" its internal metric. Lilja admits that it is "absolutely true" that they met all their internal targets, but that the game was "not competitive".

Lilja's biggest regret is not stopping development sooner. "But here's the thing. When you're working outside your core, it's also harder to know when things are supposed be done or not."

If Paradox does try its hand at a life simulation again, it won't happen for a long time. Lilja says in the interview that after the success of games such as Cities: Skylines and Crusader Kings the company began taking bigger risks and making investments without discipline. This is going to stop. While a life simulation might match Paradox's core values, it seems risky to me at this point when the main competitor has been around for decades and is backed by one gaming's largest publishers.