Hi, Alex here, the lead developer of Paralives.
Unfortunately, we had to make the difficult decision to delay the release. We are truly sorry for the last-minute announcement. After thoughtful consideration, we feel it’s best for the game and the community. This year, we ran many playtests with friends and fans, and we were confident that we could improve the game enough in time for December. In the lead-up to Early Access release, we broadened our playtests with a more varied playerbase, and the latest feedback we received made us realise the game isn’t up to the standard we wanted it to meet for release. Players enjoy the flexibility and the customization of the Paramaker and Build Mode. However, there are still impactful bugs in the Live Mode and a lack of activities to do in the town, which dampened the enjoyment of the players, and we feel it is necessary to work on these before delivering the product to the community.
I started this project wanting it to be a fresh and indie take on the doll-house life simulation genre, which had not been tackled by many game developers. I attribute this partly to the fact that a project like Paralives is a colossal task. Life sims are really 3 games in one: an advanced and flexible build mode, a greatly customizable character creator and a complex life simulation mode. Over the last 6 years of development, starting with 2-3 developers for the first years, to growing to an average team size of only 10 people, we had to alternate long stretches of development between these 3 parts of the game. We are so proud of what we have built, but now, we just need a bit more time to polish the simulation part of the game. This would ensure Paralives offers a great first experience when it launches, making players come back for every exciting free update and expansion that we will put out afterwards.
The new Early Access release date is May 25, 2026. We have updated our detailed roadmap paralives.com/roadmap with what we will be improving over the coming months, with a focus on fixing important issues and improving the first-time user experience. This will ensure that more players will be happy with the state of the game at launch when comparing it to other great life simulation games that sparked everyone’s love for the genre.
On Tuesday, November 25, at noon EDT, we will stream 45 minutes of uninterrupted live mode gameplay on our YouTube channel to show the current state of the game, the various gameplay features and explain what we will be improving before launch. We plan on keeping you all updated with streams and videos leading up to the new release date. We remain fully committed to making a quality and innovative game with the support of the community and to updating it for years to come after release. We’re beyond grateful for your continuous support, and it means the world to our small team of passionate developers!
Alex and the Paralives team