Paralives Devs Have Funded Its Roadmap in Full

With just 15 developers, the team behind the new life-simulation game, Paralives, has struck gold and is now financially set for the next few years, and they're showing their gratitude to the community by opting for free updates instead of paid DLCs.

Paralives launched into early-access on May 25th, skyrocketing to a concurrent player count peak of 78,603, and racking up over 5,000 user reviews on Steam, many of which praise the game for exceptional character creation and satisfying building features.

While life-sim fans love the overall experience, there's still a lot of work to be done before Paralives feels like a polished product, and the development team recently held a Q&A on Reddit to talk shop with their fans about what's next.

Paralives Devs Opt for Free Updates Over Paid DLCs

Nine members of the Paralives team were present at the Q&A session, including game designers, artists, music composers, and the Founder of Paralives Studio, Alex Massé.

The devs fielded every type of question you could imagine, ranging from life-quality requests, or inquiries about whether certain items or features would be added to the game—one fan couldn't resist asking if vegetarian poutine would be introduced at any point.

As starry-eyed life-simmers unleashed a tsunami-sized wave of ideas for new features and improvements, the roadmap for Paralives began to reveal itself, and it looks very promising.

While there were many great conversations taking place, there were two main topics that seemed to stand out from the rest: DLCs and autonomy.

The Paralives team revealed that a win of this magnitude will sustain the studio for years to come, allowing them to offer free updates instead of making their fans pay for additional content: "There will never be paid DLCs, only free updates! Even after the Early Access. As life sim fans, we wanted to make a game we would like to play ourselves without the need to purchase a lot of extra content, and we are happy to deliver that."

The other topic that received a lot of attention revolved around NPC autonomy. Players reported that NPCs don't really do anything when they're not being interacted with, and the devs have stated they have plans to correct this, "Autonomy is definitely a big core feature of the game that needs more love, more balancing, and especially more content. The characters are on their phone a lot mainly because those interactions can be done without targeting any other character or item, so these are the "easiest" and most common thing they can do. Adding more autonomous actions and more interactions in general during early access will help, it should make the characters do more various things!"

The developers stated their focus for the upcoming weeks/months will be to spearhead the major bugs and crashes that could negatively impact the gameplay. Once Paralives is bug-free, the devs will begin releasing new content in free updates later this year.

Features that will reportedly be added to Paralives during early access include:

• Weather and seasons
• Calendar
• Family tree
• Dogs, cats, and horses
• Cars, bikes, and boats
• Swimming
• NPC story progression
• Fishing
• Gardening
• Organizing social events
• Tools to edit and create towns
• Additional personality traits
• Pet Creation
• Genetics Editing
• More clothing items, accessories, and hairstyles

After seven years of development, Founder and Lead Developer, Alex Massé, says launching Paralives was an emotional moment, but the team can now breathe a sigh of relief and continue developing their passion project with the help of the community. "At first, I was too ambitious with the scope of the project so we had to cut things, but I'm pretty happy with what we were able to include for this first release!"