At the end of May, Paralives was released on PC via Steam. This is a simulator in the spirit of The Sims, created by fans of the franchise with money from other fans (money was raised through crowdfunding).
In a recent interview, developer Alex Massé spoke about the initial successes. As it turned out, the early version of Paralives has already sold over 900,000 copies — the authors' expectations were several times more modest:
We sold 900,000 copies in just 15 days. We absolutely did not expect such a result. We expected to sell at least 100,000 to provide the team with comfort for several years […] we are very surprised. We still can't believe it.
Alex Massé explained that before Paralives, there were essentially no competitors to The Sims on the market:
The Sims is our main competitor — previously, it practically faced no competition in this genre. Therefore, from the very beginning of the project, our goal was to occupy a free niche in the market. Players like me — fans of The Sims — were waiting for an alternative. Essentially, that's how we managed to win over the audience: they were looking for other games of this type, and we managed to attract their attention with new features — innovations that distinguish us from The Sims and make the game more appealing.
As an example, Alex cited the building mode:
Take, for example, the “build mode” from The Sims: traditionally, it uses a “1 meter by 1 meter” grid. You don't have much freedom when placing walls, everything is quite basic. So we made our system much more flexible. You can build walls at any angle — curved walls, any length, and so on. It's pretty much the same with other game modes: we've added new features everywhere.
The Paralives page on Steam is available at the following link. The first reviews of the game are “very positive,” with a rating of 90%. Currently, the project is in “early access,” and the developers plan to add new content and additional features.
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