It's been a tough couple of years for Paradox Interactive. Since the triumphant launch of Crusader Kings 3 in 2020, the strategy game specialists have struggled to land a hit. New forays into other genres such as Lamplighters League, Millennia, and Life By You have fallen short of expectations – with the latter canceled entirely as it neared launch. Cities Skylines 2 has yet to match up to its mighty predecessor. Even in the grand strategy space it knows best, Age of Wonders 4's success sits alongside the underwhelming beginning for Victoria 3. As Paradox looks to right the ship, I sit down with deputy CEO Mattias Lilja and chief creative officer Henrik Fåhraeus to ask what went wrong, and what the team has learned.
Lilja wastes no time in addressing the elephant in the room. "We've had issues," he says. "2023 and 2024 have been kind of rough for us." He notes that this isn't the first time Paradox, a studio responsible for some of the Crusader Kings 3, Europa Universalis 4, and Stellaris, has faced such problems. "We had [a rough patch] in 2013, then 2014 as well when it came to the games – so we've seen this sort of thing before and we've gotten through it."
Lilja describes two key issues: "Games that fans didn't really attach themselves to even though they were competently made, and games that were perhaps not as technically good as they should have been." I ask whether the Covid-19 pandemic was a particularly detrimental factor, to which he says, "it'd be a good scapegoat. It's a factor that made [development] harder for sure. When it comes to content velocity and quality on our core games, you can see it. But the bigger mistakes we've made, I don't think they're Covid-related." Rather, he cites the main issue as taking too-large investments outside of the team's core competency.
Most recently, this was felt with the cancellation of Life by You, a Sims-style project that the team determined had to walk "far too long and uncertain" a path to reach the necessary quality level. Here, Lilja says his main lesson learned was that "When things lie outside our core [knowledge base] and we don't really understand what the game is, it's hard for us to understand how complex finishing the product is. So it's hard for us to predict the future.
"So we rely on the developers to tell us," Lilja continues, "In this case we gave one, two, three chances, we were not where we wanted to be, and we had a hard time understanding how much was left. By the time we canceled it, we did not have a game that we thought could be released, even in early access – if we thought that we would have done it. Which means you have to stop. We should have stopped it earlier. We should have seen that this was not going to go where we wanted it to go; it would have been better for everyone."
The big takeaway, Lilja says, is to be more careful in investments that fall outside the studio's core competencies, the grand strategy and management games it knows best. "On the publishing side, these titles were the result of an initiative that was started about five or six years ago," Fåhraeus adds. "We were looking for ways that we could expand outside of our hardcore [audience]. All of these projects are quite different, honestly, but one common factor is that we simply didn't have the competency to run these products. And some were a little bit too mercenary, you know?"
"I think an idea, a high-level concept should come from the team," Fåhraeus elaborates. "It should not be given to a team to realize unless they seem very enthusiastic about it. Life by You is interesting because it really fit into the ALICE pillars on paper." This ethos, he describes, is a core summation of the values Paradox feels it excels at, and one that the studio wants all its games to match up to: "Agency of living worlds, inviting cerebral and endless experiences."
Life By You, on paper, fit these tenets, Fåhraeus notes. "So I think it wasn't a bad idea to make a life sim." He says he still believes the team can branch out from the areas it knows best, "but we need to be more careful about it, we shouldn't stray far – and if we do it should be under Arc." The Paradox Arc label is the studio's way of helping to small studios that "capture the Paradox DNA" and share their creations with the world. Established in 2022, it most recently oversaw the launch of Mechabellum 1.0.
Mechabellum is a "good example" of the ALICE principles, Lilja says. "It's an auto-battler, it doesn't look like anything we've done, but there's a lot of ALICE in it: good attachment rates, people like to play it for a long time." He reiterates the desire expressed by Fåhraeus to use Arc for more experimentation moving forward. "If we find a game in some other genre or niche that we're not in that ticks a lot of ALICE boxes, I think Arc should go there."
With Arc providing an avenue for experimentation, the core teams at Paradox are focusing more on the grand strategy genre that has been its bread and butter for years. But even that hasn't been smooth; Victoria 3 is still attempting to regain fan favor after its 2022 launch was found wanting, with key features from its predecessor absent. Meanwhile, DLC offerings for long-standing games such as Stellaris and Europa Universalis 4 have been met with discontent, proving that adding to older releases isn't a sure-fire bet either.
So how does Paradox react? "It's going to come back to producing value for the fans, and finding ways to predict that early in development," Lilja muses. "Cities 2 was more of a good game with technical issues; Victoria 3, we should have picked up that people wanted warfare earlier. So the path to fixing them is listening to the fans and fixing it." That means more peer reviews earlier in development, and a wider variety of eyes on the process to ensure different aspects of the player base are represented.
"It's hard to see the changes we make, given the long development cycles," Lilja says. "The issues we have with games releasing now – those decisions were made years ago. So I fully understand that some fans are skeptical about, 'Okay, they talk, but where's the action?' We will have to convince them by action, but we're asking for a bit of patience since it takes time to do."
There's a perpetual challenge with delivering sequels. Studios need to create something that feels new enough to justify a whole-new release, while still staying familiar to what has made the former games a success. Lilja and Fåhraeus are in agreement that the key is picking out one or two systems that are core to the fantasy of the game. If you have central systems that people enjoy, Lilja says, it's a lot easier to keep them playing while you continue to build around those ideas.
"We got critique on Stellaris [after launch] because not everything was fully fleshed out, but certain things were and those were the things that people most wanted, so they were okay with staying on," he reminisces. "Our games are really complex, and they're never really done. The question is what needs to be there at launch, and what are we given license by the fans to develop over time, either as patches or as DLC?"
"What we know is that we cannot go easy on the complexity," Lilja continues, "because that's why people come to us. We need to have the right features, high complexity, and then [figure out] how we make onboarding easier. Because we want to grow, but we can't dumb [our games] down. That's not success. And we can see that we have an influx of players in CK3 based on the fact that it's easier to get into than CK2."
Could launching games in early access be the answer? Lilja doesn't think so. "From the development team's point of view early access doesn't really do much, because you're live, you get fast, with high expectations, and you can't use that as an excuse. It's more of a marketing tool – not being cynical about it, it's more a way of communicating that what you're purchasing right now might not be up to par. Paradox Arc [games] can do it; we feel that's fair as these are small games, by small teams, with experimental designs."
So, as it looks to the future, what's next for Paradox? While there's no official word on an EU5 yet, the studio is talking about the in-development 'Project Caesar,' which looks like it might well lead to the next step in the developer's central series. It's also beginning to feel like we're due news of a follow-up to Stellaris. But what about other potential, as-yet unexplored avenues for the grand strategy giant?
"There are obviously some broad areas that I think we should cover at some point," Fåhraeus tells me. "We haven't made a dark ages game, we haven't made an ancient, birth-of-civilization type game – those two are both interesting periods. We haven't done a fantasy GSG yet. Those would seem to be low-hanging fruits." He cautions, however, that any potential expansion requires "growth of game directors and key creative people."
Fåhraeus says the reception to Stellaris, which he directed at launch, was a good confidence booster. "It was very difficult, because it strayed a little too far outside of my area of expertise, my comfort zone. It was very much a 4X game, more than our previous GSGs. So I took on a little more than I could chew, personally speaking, with Stellaris. But it paid off, and fortunately we're still going strong and keep making it better all the time."
"It's back to what we really know," Lilja concludes. "So if you look at Paradox in maybe late 2025 or 2026, I think you'll see that the games we're talking about then are going to look more like grand strategy games, management games, or at least adjacent to that." "It's getting more and more important to knock it out of the park immediately, I think," Fåhraeus adds. "People are less forgiving. I guess that's just another reason for us to focus on quality and meeting player expectations when we release games, and that's what we're going to try to do."
While we wait for the best strategy games to play in 2024.
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