What Paralives Reveals About the Life Simulator Genre
I bought Paralives in early access. I’ve told a few friends and their first question has been the same each time: “Is it good?”
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: It’s so much more complicated than that.
In 2002, I asked my parents for a copy of The Sims. We went to Myer together to look for the CD-ROM. I remember comparing the back of the boxes while my mum spoke to the sales assistant, both of us trying to figure out the difference between the expansion packs included in each bundle.
We settled on The Sims: Deluxe Edition, which had the base game and the Livin’ Large pack, as well as a sim creator tool and some exclusive items. I never knew a version of the original Sims that didn’t include icons like Vibromatic Heart Bed, the Grim Reaper, and the Tragic Clown.
I spent hundreds of hours playing that game as a kid. I went through all the usual phases: I made myself and my friends in Create-a-Sim; I built dream houses, haunted houses, and treehouses; and I removed the ladder from the pool to “see what would happen”.
Over the years, I played The Sims 2, The Sims 3, and even The Sims Medieval, but I didn’t become fully obsessed with the franchise again until The Sims 4 came out in 2014. Since then, I have invested hundreds more hours—not to mention hundreds of dollars—into the pleasure of living out virtual lives. More recently, I also became more immersed in the franchise’s paratexts, subscribing to several creators on YouTube and modders on Patreon. Like all Sims players, I go through phases with active play, but even when I’m not currently adding to my save file, I still enjoy regularly watching videos with cool builds, play challenges, or reviews of new content.
Or at least, I did.
Electronic Arts has owned the Sims IP since acquiring Maxis back in 1997. On September 29, 2025, EA reported that it would be going through its own acquisition. In the largest leveraged buyout in history, it was announced that EA was being bought for $55 billion USD, with 93.4% of that coming from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
This deal still isn’t finalised—although it is expected to be settled soon—but the reaction from the Sims community was immediate. Every Sims creator in my YouTube subscription responded negatively; the only variety was in what each decided to do about it.
Some creators pivoted to creating content for a broader range of games, decorating homes in Animal Crossing: New Horizons or using cosy indie games to fill the void. Others continued to play The Sims, but avoided talking about new packs in favour of focusing on existing content or building with only the base game (which is free to download). Several big names chose to be removed from The Sims’ official creator network, a decision that has financial consequences for them and means they are no longer able to access new Sims content early. Creators who previously collaborated with EA and built content that was released in official Sims 4 packs decided that they no longer wanted to be associated with the brand. For the last six months, Sims content on YouTube has diversified or dissolved, which is why I took notice when suddenly every Sims creator I follow was talking about Paralives.
I haven’t followed the development of Paralives particularly closely. I knew it existed, that it looked cool, and that it had been in the works for a long time (since January 2019, to be precise). But, in general, I try not to pay too much attention to potential launch dates to save myself from disappointment (looking at you, Witchbrook). This means that when Paralives ‘first look’ videos were suddenly all over my YouTube feed, it came as a pleasant surprise. I started watching these videos with general curiosity about this new life simulator, but I kept watching them because I quickly became fascinated by how experienced Sims creators were reacting to the game.
Paralives has some pretty awesome, unique features. The illustrative art style is noteworthy, the daily quests and storyteller boons keep things interesting, and dynamic shops and museum collections are an interesting addition, inspired by other cosy genres. But Sims creators cared less about these innovations and more about the small tweaks that Paralives makes to familiar systems. I watched one YouTuber literally sit open-mouthed as she layered multiple skin details like moles and freckles on top of each other—a simple character creation feature that The Sims 4 doesn’t have.
On the surface, it seems like an overreaction. But I also completely understand. The features that convinced me to buy Paralives weren’t the fancy new systems, but the little quality of life details that felt revolutionary in comparison to The Sims 4. Little things like: you can use a colour wheel to match your furniture swatches so all the timber in your house matches; you can place decorations wherever you want on tables and shelves, without needing to use tricks or mods to avoid them snapping into slots; you can independently choose overalls and the shirt you want to layer beneath them; and you can resize items like tables, windows, and rugs so they fit better in the space.
For somebody who has spent over a decade playing The Sims 4, these feel like life-changing features. Somewhere along the line, we all resigned ourselves to never seeing options like this implemented in our favourite life sim and then, suddenly, we had access to them in Paralives.
But I also feel like, for somebody unfamiliar with the genre, these features might sound objectively pretty basic. So why doesn’t a game like The Sims 4—with a huge development team, heaps of money, and a decade of time—include something as basic as a colour wheel for choosing furniture swatches?
The generous reading would be that The Sims 4 is probably swimming in technical debt. The developers have to continue adding to a ten-year-old code base, and untangling that to fix bugs or tweak base game features is probably unreasonably complicated and difficult. Huge games that have been touched by so many developers—half of whom probably aren’t with the company anymore—always have all sorts of eccentricities in engine that make even the simplest tasks bizarrely convoluted.It would likely be easier for EA to start with a clean slate, but that would also mean asking their most loyal players to give up a decade’s worth of save files and over $1,000 USD worth of DLC investment. This is EA’s official position on why they aren’t working on The Sims 5, which was announced in September 2024 and reiterated in July 2025.
Despite this position being ostensibly about prioritising Sims players, there was a pretty aggressive outcry following both of these interviews. Players—or, at least, the loud ones on Reddit—are sick of putting up with the strange bugs embedded in The Sims 4 and would prefer a fresh slate. After all, if The Sims 5 were to be released and some people decided they preferred to continue with their Sims 4 legacy challenges instead of jumping ship, they could still do that; there’s precedent for it, with plenty of people never moving from 3 to 4 because they prefer the content and mechanics of the previous title.
If I wanted to be particularly uncharitable, I would suggest that there’s simply been no reason for the Sims team—or their executives, at least—to care about improving the game’s core experience. Adding quality of life features and fixing bugs takes time and effort without directly translating into profits—especially when they’re included in a base game that is free for new players to download. To maximise income, it makes sense to pour resources into creating the next DLC rather than fixing existing issues. This is especially justifiable (if you are a capitalist overlord, anyway) when you consider that there are no true competitors to The Sims. What is the incentive to improve your product when you know you have a captive audience either way?
Most genres have at least a couple of big players. I worked on Call of Duty for years and, despite being a genre-defining shooter, it has several key contenders that kept us striving to improve everything from our weapon mechanics to our UI/UX. But The Sims has inhabited a near-vacuum for decades, which was made exceedingly obvious when Sims creators, trying to diversify their offering on YouTube, had to pivot to adjacent genres rather than other life-simulation games. They just don’t exist.
It’s not that other games haven’t tried. For example, we had a brief moment where inZoi threatened to compete with The Sims franchise when it came out in March 2025. But following some initial hype, people bounced off it. Although its photorealistic graphics were visually stunning, the game lacked depth and personality, which are vital for a complex life sim. Coupled with its significant bugs, lack of performance optimisation, and controversy around its use of generative AI, inZoi never threatened The Sims as a real contender in the genre.
Paralives has bugs too, don’t get me wrong. It’s an early access title built by a small indie team, and trying to make all the systems of a life sim interact with each other cleanly is no easy feat. But it also feels like a game made by people who genuinely love this genre and who have prioritised those “minor” quality-of-life features that we all stopped bothering to ask EA for years ago. You only need to look at the reviews for Paralives to see that players aren’t expecting perfect—they just want to feel seen; while the text in these reviews are honest about the game’s shortfalls, many players have still marked their overall experience as with the game as ‘positive’ because bugs are more easily forgiven when players feel heard, respected, and confident about a game’s priorities. Whether it’s true or not, hardcore life sim players feel like their values align with Alex Massé and his development team, and that leads to increased generosity and trust.
Paralives has arrived at exactly the right moment. People are exhausted with The Sims 4, EA, and the capitalist machine, and Paralives may represent the first meaningful competitive pressure The Sims has ever faced. It’s incredible that an indie game built by a small team and fueled by community support for the better half of a decade could be the first game that genuinely holds a torch to a juggernaut like The Sims franchise.
But that capitalist machine, unfortunately, keeps rolling. Life sims are enormous, content-heavy games that players expect to grow and evolve. Alex Massé has stated during a Reddit AMA that Paralives will never release paid DLCs and intends to only provide free updates to fans, sustaining their small development team on the sales of the base game alone. Paralives sold more than 250k copies in its first eight hours providing the team with a pretty nice nest egg, but I can’t help worrying whether it will be enough for the team to be able to fund years of ongoing development—especially under the spotlight that Sims players have shone towards it.
Right now, it feels like players—myself included—are not only hoping Paralives will be a fun, standalone indie title, but are also wondering if this game represents a shift in the life sim genre. Will it provide a meaningful alternative to The Sims franchise and act as a significant enough competitor to make EA think twice about its priorities? Only time will tell.
