Life sim fans, your time has come – upcoming indie The Sims competitor Paralives finally has an early access release date, and you can expect it to land on Steam this December.

To be exact, it’s set to arrive on December 8. The news was announced during today’s PC Gaming Show, narrowing down the previous very vague 2025 release window. Hey, it might be coming towards the end of that initial range, but it’s honestly just exciting that we now have a solid date to look forward to.

It can be tough for Sims-like games to really stand out when they all inevitably have to compete with EA’s own behemoth, and in the last year or so, fans of the genre haven’t had the greatest luck when it comes to new titles. Last June, Life by You was abruptly canceled by publisher Paradox Interactive, with one exec later admitting that “I also don’t think that it was actually clearly better than Sims 4 in any of its main areas.”

More recently, we saw the early-access release of the hyper-realistic Sims competitor inZOI, and although it quickly sold one million copies, its recent review rating on Steam is Mixed, and a number of critic reviews were rather negative, too. In our own inZOI review, we said it “currently underperforms and overpromises,” and “currently feels like a soulless imitation of the worst parts of The Sims.” Needless to say, not everyone is thrilled with it.

Meanwhile, Paralives is looking very promising. The developers previously revealed that “as a small team without any shareholders to please,” there’ll be no paid DLC – we can look forward to free updates instead. Also, there’s a duck pillow in the game, and that’s very important.

Be sure to keep up with our Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule to keep up with all the new game announcements coming out of this year’s not-E3 season.