Paradox seemed like the ones to do it, what with publishing Cities Skylines, but unfortunately their life sim was canceled.

Paralives is still going strong in development, though, with a pretty constant stream of updates. Really hoping that one sees the light of day. They’ve already got a pretty impressive building system working, but they’ve got some big ambitions, particularly when it comes to adaptive interactions with character heights.

There are several projects trying to do their own life sim. One that was supposed to be published by Paradox was cancelled recently, shortly before planned release, and to the surprise of the dev team apparently.

This is not an easy genre to develop for, lots of things can go wrong and it might be hard to find a good balance between boring and unmanageable feature creep.

Even Cities Skyline devs had a headstart, they already had a successful transport sim before they tried to fill the smoking crater left by EA SimCity’s explosion.