New Life Simulation Games on the Horizon and I'm Here for It

I am pretty stoked about the life simulation genre. It is a game genre I enjoy playing but it has been dominated by one developer, EA, for a long time. It seriously lacks diversity and is heavily skewed toward the queer community. Lastly, the Sims 4 is riddled with bugs and the developers ignore them and just churn out more packs because people are willing to pay more money hoping the game will be fixed and work as they envision. It won't, but they continue to live in their delusion.

Wanting to get away from the toxicity of the Sims community and play a life sim game that actually works I was very excited when Life by You was announced earlier this year. 

However, following the development of the game over the last few months and the promises by Rod Humble, I don't know if Paradox has given the game developer, General Manager Rod Humble, an ex Sims EVP and ex CEO of Second Life, the budget to hire people to really build a high-end life sim game. Life by You (LbY) is built on Unity, as is Paralives, which is a bit more cartoony, but is more polished than LbY. However, with Paralives being built by an indie developer that is crowdfunding through Patreon, I doubt they will ever have the financial resources to manage customer service and maintain the game like the bigger game houses. I hope they prove my reservations wrong and LbY builds a high end game & Paralives has great support. However, I do love that there will be more options in this genre, so long live Paralives and Life by You.

So today, the day after Thanksgiving, I logged onto YouTube - I've stopped watching it daily after they went after ad blockers. You can't not pay me for my content and then get mad if I block your ads Google #AmericanGreed. Any who, I logged onto YT and watched last week's LbY update and saw a recommended video for a new life sim game called inZOI, under development by a Korean game development company Krafton. What is exciting about this game is that it is built on Unreal Engine, which means hyper realism!

After watching the game announcement video, I watched an interview where the game developer explains that it is the first time he has built a life simulation game. And although people are calling it K-Sim it is not what he is going for, not a The Sims variant, but building on the genre, taking cues from The Sims and doing something different.

They've decided to use YouTubers to help them test the game and provide feedback. I get that, but what it also means is that it will be driven by the popular YT'ers who all happen to be white, so the game will again likely eclipse me and not include the kinds of things I like in the game, for instance features that are distinctly black African as well as the faith based community. How can you have a life simulation game and not have faith. Faith is so important to most of the world's inhabitants.

Having said that, I am excited about the game. I planned to purchase LbY during early access in March and I will keep a look out for inZOI as well. Their characters are called ZOIs and I am here for that. LbY just calls their characters humans and I'm like ilk. Also the ZOIs seem to have their own language like simlish, but I'm not too sure as the game intro video may not include all of the game play. Also, I LOOOOOOVE that that cat is the one pulling the strings!

Any who what do you think? Drop comment below as I am no longer on twitter or X or whatever it is called today. I am keeping it all inhouse, so leave comments on the blog or on videos when and wherever I post them.