An ambitious competitor to The Sims is in the works, for some personal reasons

The upcoming life sim inZoi has fancy graphics, lots of cats and a lead developer who recently turned 50.

inZOI. Screenshot: Krafton

As game developers get older, their reasons for making video games may change. 

For Hyungjun Kim, who spent two decades on teams developing massively multiplayer online role playing games such as Aion and Elyon in his native Korea, familiar routines had gotten old.

“I have 24 years of game development under my belt and I've been working on MMORPGs for the longest time,” Kim, now 50, told Game File. “I got sick of it.”

The games he worked on were making players overly competitive, he felt. He wanted to create something more relaxing.

The MMORPG genre is widespread in South Korea. Too much focus on it could stifle industry growth, he thought.

And one more thing: There was a question that his son asked him, a question that made him realize that he should actually try to do something no one has successfully managed to do in the video game industry: Create a successful competitor to Electronic Arts’ massively popular quarter-century-old life-simulation series, The Sims.