Paradox Interactive - Interview @ MCV

Matthew Jarvis of MCV interviewed Paradox Interactive to talk about Cities: Skylines success, how they plan to outdo EA, and why they make games for the PC.

Outside of two games released on PS3, Paradox has remained a largely PC-only publisher. Why stick with PC?

The PC platform has been a very open platform. It’s enabled us to develop both our games and our offering on the business side together with our community.

We released our first expansion for a game called Victoria in 2006; at the time, downloadable content wasn’t even discussed in the games industry. People were still saying that it would take 10 years to move onto digital distribution.

That eventually went quicker, but the fact that we were able to do it early developed this idea of releasing content after release and that the franchise wasn’t doomed if the base product didn’t sell. It allowed us to experiment in a different way.

Crusader Kings II is a great example of the PC platform being used to regularly distribute post-release add-on content. How has the market for such content evolved in recent years?

We only see interest increasing.

With our games we release paid expansion packs and smaller cosmetic DLCs, but we also release free content at the same time. The expansions don’t build on each other – you can pick and choose depending on your own personal interests.

That’s a very exciting way to go about it: having a really good product as a base and then developing and adding content depending on what you see people playing and liking, as well as what the developers are passionate about.

With the success of Skylines, this year is already off to a great start for Paradox – what’s yet to come in 2015?

2014 was a bit of a tough year for us – we decided to postpone several titles because we felt they weren’t really at where they should be. Everyone was working really hard and we weren’t feeling the fruits of that labour.

We knew 2015 was going to be a massive year for us – we call it the year of the platypus, because our logo is a platypus skeleton. We’re keeping an eye on making sure that we deliver on everything we set out to for 2015. We’ve always had a tendency to dream big, but now we’re buckling down and trying to deliver.

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Maybe we'll never know for sure what were the reasons behind Runemaster's cancellation, but I wish they had not done so. That game had an audience, it wouldn't be a failure !

Originally Posted by henriquejr
Maybe we'll never know for sure what were the reasons behind Runemaster's cancellation, but I wish they had not done so. That game had an audience, it wouldn't be a failure !

I'm thinking that, once they started getting into the nitty-gritty of RPG development (all the conversations, with several responses, and trying to track down different choices throughout the game, etc) they looked at the manpower hours being invested, against the expected return, didn't like the numbers, and abandoned it. Remember it's not only about if the game breaks even or not. It's about using the same manpower in another game, like say, Victoria 3, and comparing the RoIs. But like you say, maybe we'll never know for sure.

Bleh. I was hoping they would list their titles and expectations in 2015 (last question in the interview). Instead they gave a hohum answer. And yea runemaster seemed like a nice idea; pity it didn't work out.