Paradox Entertainment is the Swedish company behind some of the biggest, densest strategy games around, from Europa Universalis IV to Crusader Kings III. It’s also been responsible for a number of major blunders lately. Now some of its executives are on an apology tour promising a return to better times and a stricter focus on the niche strategy games it’s been known for.
Paradox’s deputy CEO Mattias Lilja and chief creative officer Henrik Fåhraeus sat down with a number of outlets to talk about the publisher’s recent failures and what it’s learning from them. Those controversies, missteps, and other issues include Cities: Skylines 2‘s buggy and incomplete Early Access launch, Prison Architect 2‘s indefinite delay, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 switching studios, Sims 4 competitor Life By You getting cancelled right before release, and reports of workplace bullying and misconduct back in 2021.
Cities: Skylines 2‘s Steam launch debacle
Cities: Skylines was an unexpected and long-lived hit that essentially usurped SimCity as the leading city manager game. A sequel seemed like a slam dunk, but in 2023 Cities: Skylines 2 came to Steam and felt like an Early Access game with less content than its predecessor and a lot more bugs. It seemed like a step down, and Paradox has been playing catchup with the game’s developer, Colossal Order, ever since. An Xbox Series X/S and PS5 port due out this fall has has been indefinitely delayed.
Lilja blames part of the early negative response to poor hardware optimization and testing. “We knew that the system requirements were going to be pretty high, but what we missed, which is absolutely our fault as a publisher, is that certain combinations of high level hardware also didn’t work,” he told PC Gamer. “We were actually in agreement that iterating this live was probably the right way to go,” Lilja said of the choice to launch in October 2023, something he now regrets. “I think the lesson learned is that we should probably not launch that early.”
When is Prison Architect 2 coming out?
Prison Architect 2 was supposed to be another straightforward follow-up. The original game about managing construction of a grim prison industrial complex sold a ton. The sequel was being made by a new studio, though, and moving to 3D, and it missed its first two release dates before being indefinitely delayed earlier this year over technical challenges and performance issues.
“It’s a fun game, and it’s been fun for quite a while, but it’s rough,” Fåhraeus told PC Gamer. “It has a rough UI. It’s a little unclear why things are happening. It crashes. So it needs that love.” Both executives are apparently adamant that the game is still coming out and won’t get surprise-cancelled at the 11th hour. “It’s a game you really want to polish up, because first impressions matter,” Fåhraeus told Game File.
If there’s a Bloodlines 3, Paradox won’t be making it
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is another MIA Paradox game, one with a very passionate and devout fanbase. A sequel to the cult-hit 2004 action-RPG by the short-lived Troika Games, it was originally being made by Hardsuit Labs, a studio known primarily for co-development and ports. But in 2021, Paradox handed the reins over to maker of bespoke, narrative-driven walking sims, The Chinese Room.
“We understand that given the long development time and changing the devs, that the business case might be strained,” Lilja told PC Gamer. “But we’re still on track and we’re still focused on delivering this game.” He added that action games aren’t really the publisher’s forte, and while it’s committed to shipping Bloodlines 2, it’s a one-off. So if Bloodlines 2, God willing, is successful, Bloodlines 3 [will be] done by someone else, on the license from us,” Lilja said.
Likening the game to Dishonored, he told Game File that it will come out and succeed or fail, and there are no plans to give it a Victoria 3-style post-launch rehabilitation if it’s bad. Bloodlines 2 is currently due out in the first half of 2025.
Life By You was cancelled over quality concerns
The Sims 4 is huge, with EA continuing to pump out new content packs and updates every year. But at 10 years old and with no sequel in sight, it seemed like the perfect time for a competitor. Paradox Tectonic, led by a former Sims and Second Life veteran, was supposed to make exactly that with Life By You. Then earlier this year, right before its planned Early Access launch, Paradox canned the game and the entire studio was laid off.
“For the last two or three years, when we’ve looked at it, we’ve seen a lot of issues, mainly graphics, performance, bugs, all kinds of weirdness,” Fåhraeus told Game File. “And we focused on feedbacking on those particular issues a lot, especially the graphics. We hammered that heavily for a long time.” He added that the game just wasn’t good enough—not “clearly better than Sims 4 in any of its main areas”— and should have been cancelled earlier. That’s despite at least one former developer on the game saying the team had been hitting all its internal goals, suggesting it was a failure of high-level business strategy rather than shortcomings of those on the studio floor.
Fåhraeus told PC Gamer and others that its plan for avoiding more Life By You-style catastrophes is to cancel more projects early on and stick closer to Paradox’s core competencies rather than venturing outside its wheelhouse with ambitious new experiments. It’s still not entirely clear, however, just what new structures or guardrails prevent the publisher from going off track again. Back in 2021, an executive shakeup saw then-CEO Ebba Ljungerud depart over a “differing view” on the company’s strategy moving forward.
“I think at the end of 2025 and then maybe 2026, we’re gonna see the shift that we’re trying to make, the return to the core in the company and the core in the games,” Lilja told Gamesindustry.biz. “It’s going to crystallize [in] 2025 and hopefully be very clear by 2026.”
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