Grand strategist

Even by the standards of the videogame industry’s past few years, Paradox Interactive has not had a great 2024. At the year’s start, its slate was led by three games that seemed to push the Swedish publisher outside of its traditional grand-strategy niche. There was Life By You, a competitor to The Sims headed up by that series’ former EA boss, Rod Humble; Prison Architect 2, continuing the hit management sim series, to which Paradox had acquired the rights in 2019; and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, a long-gestating followup to the cult RPG.
In May, two weeks before its intended early-access release date, Life By You was delayed indefinitely; that was followed by confirmation that the game had been cancelled, and Tectonic – the California-based in-house studio Paradox had formed to make it – was being shut down. All this came just weeks after news that longtime Prison Architect steward Double Eleven was no longer going to be working on the sequel, which would instead be handled by Brazilian support studio Kokku. And Bloodlines 2 has been pushed back to 2025, giving The Chinese Room a chance to finish the game it had inherited from original developer Hardsuit Labs, removed from the project back in 2021.
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To have one bad year may be regarded as misfortune, perhaps. But looking slightly further back, at 2023’s launches – The Lamplighters League, which performed so poorly that Paradox divested the studio on New Year’s Day, and seemingly sure bet Cities: Skylines II, which was brought low by technical difficulties – it’s hard not to ask: where did it all go wrong? And so, sitting down with Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja, we do.
There’s no denying that it’s been a difficult period for Paradox Interactive. Having been with the company since 2009, where do you think it all went wrong?
We started out very focused on trusting the devs and listening to the fans – I think that’s where we succeed. That’s the recipe. When we try something that’s way outside of what we usually do, we can struggle. A couple of years ago is when some of these projects were started. They were bold, and they were big, and they were often quite far outside what we usually do. And that’s where we’ve struggled the most.
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If we release a game that we know a lot about – [2022 grand strategy] Victoria 3, for instance – that didn’t have the best start, we know how to fix it. When we do something outside of our core, we can get into issues. We’re not as ready to maybe understand what we’re doing or how to fix that.
Victoria 3 aside, the most obvious case of a game that’s had a difficult launch, but that you know how to fix, is surely Cities: Skylines II. What can you say about the status of that game now?
It’s frustrating that we have to launch like that. Cities II is an example where we knew some of the issues, but we also had things that surprised us [on a technical level]. But also, we knew that this is a type of game that people want. Of course, everybody – including me – is frustrated at the pace of this, but we are making progress there.
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To the point of knowing that this was a game people wanted – was not knowing that the problem with Life By You?
It’s the type of bet that I think Paradox should take: a really cool concept, in a genre that’s sort of adjacent to Cities [Skylines], and we had people that had the experience to do it. So it makes sense to me – if we had a similar chance, I’d do it again. But I would start differently. Because [Tectonic] quite quickly grew to be a large team; experimenting or pivoting became expensive and dangerous.
The game was delayed multiple times before eventually being cancelled – at what point did it become apparent that it wasn’t going to work?
Again, it comes back to our core being GSGs, and to a certain extent management games like Cities. So in this case, we didn’t really understand how far it had to go, how much was left. We have this strong tradition of trusting the dev, which we did in this case, once, twice and three times, and then at that point it was like, “We’re not getting where we want to go.”
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We realised we weren’t heading in the right direction, so if we went further with it, we would only be more lost, and it would cost us more. As a publisher, we can’t continue to do this. And we didn’t find any other good way to continue with the team, so we had to stop. And that’s absolutely on us – the devs did everything they could to deliver on the vision. But I would say that time was not on our side, given the size of the project.
How does that process, of trusting the developer, apply when a project has to change hands, as was the case with Prison Architect 2?
There are different reasons to change developers on a project, and in this case it was very amicable – we’re fully content with Double Eleven. It was one of those cases where, we have a game, it’s just not ready for… Fans are not gonna appreciate the state it’s in.
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Back when I started at Paradox, we had a market with fans feeling the squeeze, being very sensitive about their investments, about their time – high expectations, high frustration when things do not deliver. And we’re in that space again now. Gaming has always been winner takes all, and it’s even more so now. People flock to a few, a low number of games, and many are not delivering. So we’re in the mindset that we’re going to have to extend projects to not end up with a good game delivered too soon, [in a state] that people don’t want. With Cities [II] we were a bit hot on the button, and that’s tough on everybody.
Looking back, we have to be very careful about what we ask fans to accept. Prison Architect 2, we don’t think this is the time to release it. We like the game, but it needs a couple more rounds of polishing.
For the process of deciding when a game is ready, will you be looking to Cities II’s example to measure that?
If you go back to our history – and history is hard to argue with – many Paradox games are not at their best when they launch – they’re best a couple of years after. What you need is a game that enough people like, and love, and they can tell you what to fix and what to prioritise.
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Not every game that struggles at launch enjoys the same long tail as Cities II, though. Post-launch work was put on hold for The Lamplighters League, after a “weak” commercial performance, according to Paradox’s financials. What went wrong there, do you think?
That’s a good question, and one we’re still looking at. Genres come and go, and in the tactical space, there seem to be single games that do well, and there’s no second or third place in that race. In some genres, there’s enough of an audience that you can be second or third and do well. And unfortunately we didn’t have anything else for the studio, so we had to take drastic measures there. The game reviewed fine – just not enough people wanted to play it. And that’s the harsh reality, so then we need to pull back from that.
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And what about Millennia? As a Civ-style 4X game, that seems closer to your traditional core, but it doesn’t seem to have really found its audience.
I think everybody who’s trying to establish a new IP the last couple of years has had a ha...