„The Curse of Success” and Overconfidence Are Reasons for Paradox’s Failures. Company Returns to Its Roots and Focuses on Pre-Production
Smaller games, longer pre-production, and more prototypes and beta testing. These are the assumptions Paradox Interactive has made to avoid a repeat of Cities: Skylines 2.
The Paradox company is returning to its roots after recent not entirely successful game releases. The deputy chairman, Mattias Lilja, and the chief creative director, Henrik Fahraeuz, admitted this in an interview with Game Developer about the publisher's recent failures, pointing to the causes of problems in recent years.
Paradoxical "curse of success"
Let's face it: although Paradox Interactive had successful games in recent years, it's easy to forget about them in the context of major failures, such as the debuts of many anticipated titles. Victoria 3, The Lamplighters League, and of course Cities: Skylines 2 are prime examples of games from the company's catalog that were in poor condition upon release.
According to Lilja, Paradox was hit by the "curse of success" - the publisher felt too confident and focused on rapid development and large investments, including in titles outside its previous specialization. The result was that the company had several large teams making separate projects, which - it was believed - reduced the risk of failure. According to Fahraeus, it was completely the opposite and in retrospect, Paradox was "undisciplined" in its decisions.
A few years ago, we had a period in which we invested a lot of money and a lot of it in [projects - ed. note], which we were not used to. We had this idea that we could go on a fairly large scale and still be successful. Now I believe that we were wrong on a few issues.
I think that in a way we were developing quickly because we achieved success and wanted to try different things. We wanted to experiment and we had cash on hand. We were probably somewhat undisciplined in some of our early decisions, especially in trusting that a larger team would mean less risk (...), instead of realizing that it's the opposite. Smaller teams are better.
Life By You Problems
The prime example of this was supposed to be Life By You. The would-be rival of the The Sims series consumed about 20 million dollars and was ultimately canceled. It wasn't a desperate cost-cutting: Paradox didn't borrow money and could afford to take the risk. Except that in this case it turned out to be unnecessary.
Lilja didn't mince words: Life By You wouldn't stand a chance against The Sims 4. Problems in the work of Paradox Tinto studio were noticed too quickly - from the visuals (especially the appearance of characters) to the bland gameplay.
On top of that, the whole thing didn't stand out positively compared to the competition, and without that it would have been hard to convince loyal Sims fans to give LBY a chance, and early access probably wouldn't have helped here, despite the progress made by the developers.
[The game - ed. note] didn't stand out in any particular way. It was in no way better than The Sims 4. You can talk about customization options and so on, which were great, but they really aren't gameplay. Even though it was a game planned as early access - I think that in the case of early access, you have to release something that is really very, very fun and quite polished.
It may be modest in terms of content and options in the late game stage, but at the beginning, it really has to provide joy from playing, and we, unfortunately, were far from achieving this goal.
(Too) early access and beta testing
This is another time when Paradox refers to the issue of early access. Recently, Lilja hinted that he doesn't fully like early access - in the sense that players tend to criticize what comes from it: modest content. In his opinion, Early Access games may not have much content and endgame: it is more important that this early version is fun and polished.
This does not mean that Paradox is not in favor of testing the game with players. On the contrary, one of the assumptions of the company's "reconstruction" is to attract players as early as possible, even before the premiere. Lilja admits that although it was still used for DLC and larger updates, they have neglected it in the context of games in recent years.
We often do this with our DLCs and big patches, which you can check out in the open beta version on Steam. We used to be better at this because we conducted huge closed beta tests and we had dedicated fans who came much earlier. Somehow we haven't been doing this correctly recently and we need to get back to be really good at it.
In other words, Paradox actually wants to test the game with players like in early access, but the title must already be polished enough for players to have fun during the game. This will avoid the problems that affected Cities: Skylines 2, among others.
Humble beginnings instead of great failures
We have already mentioned that the creation of large teams was recognized by the Paradox board as a mistake. Instead, the publisher now wants to focus on smaller developer groups and more prototyping, and longer pre-production. This will facilitate the detection of key issues in projects. However, in the event that they cannot be saved, abandoning these titles at an early stage of work will be less painful than canceling a game developed by a large team for many months.
This is a much better way to create games than trying to build a large team and then realizing too late that we are actually lost. Then we are left with few options - which is terrible for teams and studios.
That's exactly what I mean when I say to go back to the roots. Let's stay where we are competent. Start small. Build from that place. This is a kind of lesson. When you talk about it, it seems obvious, but a few years ago we were not in such a situation.
Premature debuts and Paradox's restart
Both interlocutors of the Game Developer admit that it seems obvious now. The same can be said about the publisher releasing many games too early. Failure of The Lamplighters League (among others, as a result of an unwise decision related to poor optimization on PC) led to a breakup with Harebrained Schemes (studio that wanted to continue creating such productions, despite the publisher's reluctance). However, one could write at length about what Cities: Skylines 2 looked like at its premiere. Heck, even today the players have reasons to complain.
That's why a kind of "restart" of the company was needed, a return to what its developers know. This does not mean that Paradox is completely giving up on larger games - but these will only represent genres "quite close" to the creators' competencies.
