The developers behind inZOI announced a 2025 early access release date on Thursday despite assurances that the hyper-realistic life sim would still launch sometime this year.
Game producer and director Hyungjun “Kjun” Kim posted an open letter to the community on the inZOI Discord saying that the game will be coming out on March 28, 2025, instead of in late 2024 so that the developers can give the game “the best possible start.”
While inZOI never received a concrete release date until Thursday, a spokesperson for the team at Krafton told PC Gamer just last month that the plan was to release it in 2024. In August, the studio released inZOI: Character Studio on Steam, a demo of its character creator. It was only up for five days, but immediately drew the attention of players who wanted to re-create fictional characters and real-life people with ridiculous amounts of detail.
Following feedback from that demo, along with various playtests, Kim said the team needed to work more to give players “the most complete experience possible.”
“It is said that among primates, raising a human child to adulthood takes the longest time because humans must be prepared to endure and adapt to their ever-changing surroundings,” Kim wrote. “The extra love and care that is required to properly nurture a child is how I see our journey with inZOI—a game that we will be nurturing together from its Early Access birth. This change in our release date represents our dedication to giving inZOI a stronger foundation, so we can embark on this journey together in the best way possible.”
InZOI is poised to be a real The Sims competitor, and is one of the few still due for release after Paradox Interactive canceled its entry in the genre, Life by You, before it could even reach early access. At the time of this writing, it’s the 12th most wishlisted game on Steam.
