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Comment by dysoco | Hacker News Reader

Wonder why a "The Sims" competitor hasn't appeared yet, would the lack of branding and general "charm" of The Sims(like Simlish) be a dealbreaker?

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Paralives is the big one that's in development and crowdfunded.

They pull in >$40k/mo in Patreon funding, and have a team of >10.

Website: https://www.paralives.com/ Their Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/alexmasse

Unaffiliated, just a massive Sims fan :)

They actually announced one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNhV-Gnjdy8

Interesting, seems Paradox is becoming the new Maxis, or maybe it's Colossal Order (developer of Cities: Skylines) who is also the developer of this "Life by You"?

Life by You isn't by CO, it's by a Paradox subsidiary they set up in the US, headed by the old EP of Sims 2 and Sims 3.

I hope someone fully realizes the vision of Spore (which was overly ambitious when it came out)

And I don't mean in the way No Man's Sky did!

I hope we someday get a spiritual successor to SimEarth or SimAnt

That was actually one of the announcements made! Seems to be a Sims clone, in the early stages of development. I'm honestly looking forwards to it, rather than spending 1,000$ on Sims 4 on Steam.

Their sims-like game is actually developed by Paradox, so it's guaranteed there will be endless paid DLCs.

On one hand, that’s absolutely true. On the other hand Paradox does a good job in maintaining the base game and constantly supplying it with free new features with every expansion.

I am extremely optimistic looking at the CK3 DLCs though - they're closer to the early CK2 expansions that massively rehaul large portions of the game mechanics. I'm not certain if they're fully committed to that direction but it certainly feels better to look at those sorts of expansions than, say, HoI4 or some of the EU4 expansions which are generally just regional flavor packs.

I think they're not enamored of their reputation for crap shoveling and are making a concerted effort to deliver more value with their overhauls and that's why I've never really viewed them the same as skin-pushers like Roblox, CS:GO, The Sims or Fortnite.

PDX has been burned before by releasing DLC features that implicitly depend on other DLC features, and having to release patches that either unblock or kludge around it. The policy of “new mechanics are free, special abilities are paid” seems to me like a hard-learned lesson on maintaining configurations.

sims style DLCs are just a proxy subscription revenue model. As long as people are engaged consumers you can keep developing. If they don’t care about a particular DLC they don’t have to buy it. Sims 4 now has like 8 years of developer labor in it, if you were to install all the content. The original $30 (after retail cut) a user paid in 2015 wouldn’t have sustained that work.

Having to actually pay a subscription is actually much friendlier to players who want to get into the game a couple of years after it was first released. Of course the DLC model is much more profitable overall

If you're getting into a game years later then you probably don’t want all the content at once. Buy the base game with none of the DLC and play that for a while. Then decide which DLC will best enhance your current game; for example you might decide you want an amazing airport in your current city, so you get the Airports DLC. Or you might prefer a large University campus, so you get that one instead. Spread the content out over a year or two so that you are sure to get your money’s worth. Or just ignore the DLC and download mods and assets from the Steam workshop; you could spend a lifetime doing that and never catch up.

> probably don’t want all the content at once

If we’re talking about games developed by Parodox itself I really can’t imagine something like this. Core mechanics in most grand strategy games have usually been changed to a significant degree and while they are technically playable without DLCs the changes were most often made to better integrate the new content. Which overall left the base game in a largely crippled state.

Skylines is a lot better in this regard than something like Stellaris though.

I found https://store.steampowered.com/app/1538960/Crusader_Kings_II... to be an extremely good deal especially because I never tend to play these games continuously for significant periods of time. Obviously they are not offering this for newer games since it would usually lead to people spending 10s of dollars instead of 100s for the same amount of content .

Life By You seems to be that, which was also announced.

Another one is called Paralives: https://www.polygon.com/23433566/sims-5-project-rene-paraliv...

Actually, I want a Sims-like game with a real language instead of Simlish. It would be a great way to learn a language when immersion isn't possible.

I guess one reason they did this was because there would be a limited number of phrases and it would get repetitive quickly. LLMs could work around that today.

The brand is too strong with The Sims. It has multiple generations of fans who started with the original and are still playing the latest game.

As a long time fan I'm completely open to alternative takes on the life sim idea.

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