The Sims competitor is close to its first million - Paralives sales far exceeded developers' expectations

Players have long been looking for an alternative to The Sims, and finally, an offer has appeared on the market.

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.

The Sims competitor is close to its first million - Paralives sales far exceeded developers' expectations

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