Why do people assume that small team cannot make great game? I would even say - it is more probable than a huge studio as EA.
1. Where is no difference in difficulty. The difference is - people versus time. For example - for a feature X you will need 10 000 lines of coding. So you could think that a big studio can hire 4 devs and make it 4 times faster than 1 person in small studio... but it is not true. In reality the communication between workers and the fact that small team probably everyone is more familliar with the game code the difference will be smaller. So yeah - for a small team it will probably take more time.
2. Paralives do not spend milions for marketing
3. Paralives do not need to pay milions of dollars to CEO (seriously check how much they make)
4. Paralives have less management cost
5. Paralives do not have stakeholders on the top. So they are not pushed to sell as little work as possible for the most money they can get.
Do you really believe that EA just "cant" do a lot of things players want? That is not the issue. There is no "cant" in general in programming. You may not be able to make a feature that will work well on low end spec computers but there is no general "not possible". What they mean by saying "it is not possible" is - it takes a lot of time (so money for developers) and it will not bring us the amount of profit that we want". You are welcome - I translated it for you.
I believe in Paralives because they are free of worring about it. I hope they will charge a fair (not too low) price for the game and I hope they will continue with paid extra content. You should be rewarded for the fair work you do. This what we are getting from EA is not 'fair' it is less and less for the same or even more amount of money.
The real danger for Paralives is IMHO sims legal team. I can see the real chance they will sue them over the smallest simmilarities and I hope Paralives team have a great bugdet for the legal battles.
The other worry is the performance issues - it might be the problem when your testing team is small. But for the other hand - the big company as EA is not better, it is a shame how bugs there are in sims.
Sorry for my English - I am not native :)
I do work in programming related field, it is not game dev but more business apps development but I do believe that proccess is pretty simmilar to what I do.
