Inzoi Studio head says early access was unavoidable, but he feels kind of bad about it: 'The users are testing it on our behalf, so I always feel sorry for them'

PC Gamer life simmer Mollie Taylor said last year that Inzoi, the much-hyped Sims-like from Krafton, is a "shallow imitation" of the series that inspired it, and that she's not even sure "it understands what makes those games so special in the first place." Seems like Mollie was pretty much dead on the money with that analysis, as Inzoi Studio head Hyungjun "Kjun" Kim told IGN that making life sim games is tougher than he expected, and "if you asked me if I would turn back time and make it again, I think I would hesitate."

"The biggest thing I learned is, The Sims has been the biggest for three decades, and I think I have figured out why that is," Kim said. "The Sims 3 was open world, and The Sims 4 moved to a more loading-based [game]. I understand why they did that. It’s really hard. There may not be any other team that attempts to make an open world life sim game."

Kim said he's been making videogames for 29 years, but despite that extensive experience, he realized that his ambitions for Inzoi were "too much." That's why Inzoi Studio decided to release a demo (no longer available, sadly) ahead of the game's early access release: "We actually did it to prevent people who didn't quite fit the game from making the wrong purchase."

Inzoi came out strong, and sold more than a million copies in its first week, but it didn't really set the world on fire the way fans of the genre hoped it might. Concurrent player numbers on Steam have declined dramatically, although Krafton argued sales are a more relevant metric for a premium singleplayer game. There's no getting around the fact that Inzoi launched with "many shortcomings," as Kim acknowledged, although that's hardly unusual for early access releases.

"The reason we had to use early access is that we cannot see the results ourselves," Kim said. "So we had no choice but to use early access. The users are testing it on our behalf, so I always feel sorry for them."

Frankly, I feel like Kim is maybe being a little tongue-in-cheek here. Yes, Inzoi players are effectively serving as beta testers (and paying for the privilege), but that's the deal: You lay your money down up front, you get to play before most other people, and in theory at least, your feedback shapes the course of the game up to release. It maybe sucks a bit when things are rough out of the gate, but there's nothing underhanded about it, as Kim well knows.

And Inzoi remains a work in progress: Inzoi Studio recently shared a first anniversary message on Steam, providing both a retrospective and look at the game's future, which includes a new content roadmap, enhanced mod support, and a "UGC (User-Generated Content) ecosystem where the entire playerbase can be involved in the creation process."