Paradox Interactive's leaders think you deserve an explanation
After a run of bad news, two of the top execs of one of the world's premier strategy game studios want to talk about went wrong.
“I personally hate the kind of reputation we've had, at least cyclically or periodically, to release unfinished games,” Henrik Fåhraeus, chief creative officer of Paradox Interactive recently told me.
“You know, that's got to stop.”
Fåhraeus and I were not talking for the usual reasons that a game company’s public relations team reaches out for an executive interview.
Usually these chats are set up amid some good news, not after string of calamitous headlines.
But here were Fåhraeus and Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja on a video call with me to talk about a run of bad news:
Paradox had canceled its would-be Sims competitor in June, the month it was supposed to launch into early access.
And they shut down its studio.
In August, they delayed a prison management game “indefinitely” a month prior to its release date.
Last year hadn’t been all that better. In October 2023, they’d released a game called Lamplighters League that, one week later, they wrote off as a commercial failure.
Recently, a longtime Paradox fan over at the site Aftermath, wrote: Paradox, What Are You Doing?
Exactly why did they want to talk about all this?
“It's part of communicating with our players and answering why we've been behaving a bit oddly—and maybe failed them in some respects,” Fåhraeus said.
Lilja and Fåhraeus wanted to explain what had gone wrong. And so they did. Very bluntly.
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