InZOI, PUBG maker Krafton’s competitor to The Sims, launched a year ago in early access form, and at a recent Q&A session at the studio’s Seoul office, IGN learned all about the struggles and successes of its first 12 months. It’s fair to say it’s been an eye-opening experience for the developer, especially Head of inZOI Studio Hyungjun “Kjun” Kim.
“Life sim games are difficult to master,” Kim said. “If you asked me if I would turn back time and make it again, I think I would hesitate.”
InZoi launched big on Steam with an all-time peak concurrent player count of 87,377. Krafton then announced inZOI had sold an impressive 1 million copies in a week, making it the fastest selling game published by the South Korean megacorp. It rose to number one on Steam’s Global Top Sellers List (by sales revenue) just 40 minutes after release, and Krafton CEO Changhan ‘CH’ Kim said at the time that the company planned to “foster” the game as a “long-term franchise IP.” However, inZoi’s Steam concurrent player count has dwindled since launch, with a 24-hour peak of 4,196.
“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,” Hyungjun “Kjun” Kim explained. “The Sims 3 was open-world, and The Sims 4 moved to a more loading-based. 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.”
“To put it simply, I’ve been doing this for about 29 years now. I’ve been making games for a very long time, but after trying it out, I realised that I couldn’t do it properly. It was too much. So, the reason we released a demo was that, well, it didn’t really fit the specs. So, we actually did it to prevent people who didn’t quite fit the game from making the wrong purchase.”
In June last year, Krafton addressed an ongoing debate about inZoi’s plummeting Steam concurrent player count, insisting that as a single-player game sales were a better indicator of performance. Speaking of which, over 1.2 million sales were achieved on PC in inZoi’s first year, with a console version also on the horizon. Not that this is a number that particularly takes up a lot of Kim’s thoughts. He puts the existing fans of the game first and foremost, constantly updating the early access life sim with features to make it as satisfying as possible.
“When it was released to customers, there were many shortcomings in the game running as a complete game,” Kim admitted. “The reason we had to use early access is that we cannot see the results ourselves. 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.”
In fact, Kim revealed he sometimes wonders why inZOI’s development team needs to aim to have such lofty sales goals altogether, and can’t instead focus on making a game the fans want it to be, especially when the studio falls under the Krafton umbrella, which has PUBG practically printing money for the Korean publisher.
“Do I really have to make a lot of money?” Kim asked. “Isn’t that how a company is? It seems to have diverse futures. Even if some people make a lot of money, others might be presenting possibilities regarding the future of games. Who knows, maybe later on, the future of the entire game industry?”
Kim not only looks toward the future of the games industry globally, but also much closer to home, revealing personal connections to life sim games that he and his son share. “When I was young, The Sims was incredibly helpful to me,” Kim said.
“My son started playing The Sims,” Kim continued. “He’s much bigger than me. He asks me questions and says he wants to become a game developer too. From my perspective, my son doesn’t seem to have any talent, so I worry about him these days. I don’t know why he seems so untalented, but I thought maybe if he just played some InZOI, he might learn game development.”
Poor Mr. Kim’s son. But the future is at least looking a little brighter in this regard, when it comes to his prospects of becoming a game developer, and how that could impact his father’s creation. “My son is now a modder for everything,” Kim said. “He makes all the mods. He is building up the feeling that he would like InZOI to be modded later on.”
For more from inZOI, check out our early access review, or the time I had a mid-life crisis inside of it.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
