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“The reason that our business is sustainable is that we launch a game, that is good enough.
But, like a painting - when is a painting done?
When you stop painting it, I guess.
Game development is quite a lot the same.”
It’s now called Early Access, but we did that earlier and we didn’t call it that.
We developed as far as we thought would [make for] a good game.
But he still thinks Paradox are walking the line well enough.
“Not all systems are created equal.
So the question is, what systems are core to this game.
But maybe we don’t do everything because again, we would never be done.”
“When we fail, it looks something likeVictoria 3,” he went on.
“People wanted more warfare.
So you had other things, diplomacy, economics, building your country, whatever.
But people wanted the warfare.
So there we maybe missed it a bit.
Paradox are still “catching up” with Victoria 3, he added.
What does this division of labour and resources translate to in hard numbers, I asked?
How do Paradox allocate time between the launch game and post-release development?
“So it could be five to one, for the base game versus the first big DLC expansion.
We can do smaller content, but it’s very clear that people prefer the bigger DLCs.
The picture is always shifting, however.
Echoingother industry executives, Lilja observed that development costs have gone up dramatically over the past decade.
“Generally speaking, the requirements on games, have grown over time,” he noted.
“People get accustomed to a certain standard, I guess.
And they expect that or better.
So team sizes over time have grown quite a lot.
It’s a big difference.”
“But it also means that every piece of content we make becomes more expensive.”
I spoke to Paradox’s chief creative officer Henrik Fahraeus after my chat with Lilja.
“That’s the negative way of looking at it,” he told me.
That’s what we’re after.”
But he also told me that you could’t yo everyone.
What do players expect?
