Hi all,
It’s been a while since we personally posted here! Historically, we’ve shared regular updates on Paradox Interactive in general to shareholders and investors through our quarterly reports and financial livestreams. However, we’ve been lacking in our communication straight to you, our players. That’s why we wanted to test sharing a reflection and comment on what has happened in the past year for Paradox as a whole and perhaps drop some hints on what the future holds, since we know there are plenty of you that are interested in those topics! If you feel it’s valuable, we’ll continue with this type of rear-view mirror comments around this time of the year going forward. You can also still keep up on our publicly reported financials in our year-end report.
2024 has been a rollercoaster. Trying to plot Paradox’s course based on this year only is probably an exercise in confusion. Though we’ve launched seminal expansions to our titles, we’ve also decided to cancel and delay games, which has been very painful for everyone involved. So without further ado, it might be good to start off this letter by highlighting what we actually want to get done in the coming year(s).
As I think Mattias has said before in this forum, our job is to release games that are fun, interesting, and challenging for our players, and everything we do should be done with that purpose in mind. For us, this means zoning in on what our players want from us, and what we know well how to do. That spells (mainly) Grand Strategy and to a large extent management/simulation, since those are game genres where we can provide the complex, endless and fun experiences that you rightfully expect from us. And considering everything that happened in 2024, this is more important than ever.
A few years back, we had a much wider view on what the games we wanted to make and publish were, since we tried to broaden our repertoire. This meant going beyond what we actually know and do. Since then, we’ve slowly been working to find our way back to what and who we are, and the past year has been important, as it has made our shortcomings clearer, when we venture too far out. Now and in the future, Paradox will have a stronger tilt towards our internal studios and the games they’re great at making. That does not mean we aren’t interested in third-party developers; many of them have skills and ideas we don’t, but we’ve also realized that we’re not a great fit for every developer and game. And every developer and game is not a great fit for us.
Of course, this impacts the type of games we will develop in the long-run. While we still have games in development that are outside of our comfort zone, they are becoming fewer and fewer as we’ve worked through games we took on in previous years, and have clearer skew on the games that we’ve started since then. As it stands, most of our current mainline games in development are either Grand Strategy or Management/Simulation and in line with ALICE (our Game Pillars), and we intend to keep it this way, since we know that is what you want, and what we love to make.
To the degree that a game is not “mainline,” it is published by Paradox Arc at a much smaller scale than our mainline titles since Arc acts as our incubator for small teams with strong ideas that may be a bit outside of our field of expertise. You can consider these games more “experimental” (for us at least) if you wish.
A pretty apparent lesson from 2024 is that everything always looks great on paper and as was the case with our cancelled titles this year, you tend to cling to hope when you love an idea. As we all know, execution is what really counts at release—no matter how amazing the initial idea might be.
In this area we’ve fallen short in 2023/2024 with releases that suffered from technical performance and similar issues. It’s in this area that we’ve focused a lot in the latter half of 2024: part of it comes down to the arcane inner workings of a corporate entity; ensuring that our processes are up to snuff, that we have checks and balances in place, that we have an outstanding assessment and management of risks, the right people in the right places…you know the drill. This corporateness aside, the “true” solution is both more simple and a lot more difficult. It comes down to being uncompromising on the quality expected from us, ending games early (or going back to the drawing board) when we notice that the idea or execution is struggling, and most importantly, listening to our players.
I don’t think I can emphasize the last point enough. Our most successful games build on a constant back and forth with many of you. It’s always been a very honest conversation, and we want to sincerely thank you, our community, for all the great feedback and ideas that you give us. We will try to bring in our players and fans at earlier stages of development to ensure that we make the experience that you want, and I think Tinto Talks is a great example of this. On that note, if there are topics that you’d like to hear more about in this type of more corporate leaning communications, please let us know!
Now, looking ahead at 2025, we definitely have content lined up that we’re excited about. Of course we’ve got new expansions (as a surprise to no one) but we also aim to have some new games that are more firmly on our home turf. We hope that this will be a big year for Paradox and we really look forward to it! Thank you for coming along for the ride.
Sincerely,
Fredrik Wester, CEO
Mattias Lilja, Deputy CEO
It’s been a while since we personally posted here! Historically, we’ve shared regular updates on Paradox Interactive in general to shareholders and investors through our quarterly reports and financial livestreams. However, we’ve been lacking in our communication straight to you, our players. That’s why we wanted to test sharing a reflection and comment on what has happened in the past year for Paradox as a whole and perhaps drop some hints on what the future holds, since we know there are plenty of you that are interested in those topics! If you feel it’s valuable, we’ll continue with this type of rear-view mirror comments around this time of the year going forward. You can also still keep up on our publicly reported financials in our year-end report.
2024 has been a rollercoaster. Trying to plot Paradox’s course based on this year only is probably an exercise in confusion. Though we’ve launched seminal expansions to our titles, we’ve also decided to cancel and delay games, which has been very painful for everyone involved. So without further ado, it might be good to start off this letter by highlighting what we actually want to get done in the coming year(s).
As I think Mattias has said before in this forum, our job is to release games that are fun, interesting, and challenging for our players, and everything we do should be done with that purpose in mind. For us, this means zoning in on what our players want from us, and what we know well how to do. That spells (mainly) Grand Strategy and to a large extent management/simulation, since those are game genres where we can provide the complex, endless and fun experiences that you rightfully expect from us. And considering everything that happened in 2024, this is more important than ever.
A few years back, we had a much wider view on what the games we wanted to make and publish were, since we tried to broaden our repertoire. This meant going beyond what we actually know and do. Since then, we’ve slowly been working to find our way back to what and who we are, and the past year has been important, as it has made our shortcomings clearer, when we venture too far out. Now and in the future, Paradox will have a stronger tilt towards our internal studios and the games they’re great at making. That does not mean we aren’t interested in third-party developers; many of them have skills and ideas we don’t, but we’ve also realized that we’re not a great fit for every developer and game. And every developer and game is not a great fit for us.
Of course, this impacts the type of games we will develop in the long-run. While we still have games in development that are outside of our comfort zone, they are becoming fewer and fewer as we’ve worked through games we took on in previous years, and have clearer skew on the games that we’ve started since then. As it stands, most of our current mainline games in development are either Grand Strategy or Management/Simulation and in line with ALICE (our Game Pillars), and we intend to keep it this way, since we know that is what you want, and what we love to make.
To the degree that a game is not “mainline,” it is published by Paradox Arc at a much smaller scale than our mainline titles since Arc acts as our incubator for small teams with strong ideas that may be a bit outside of our field of expertise. You can consider these games more “experimental” (for us at least) if you wish.
A pretty apparent lesson from 2024 is that everything always looks great on paper and as was the case with our cancelled titles this year, you tend to cling to hope when you love an idea. As we all know, execution is what really counts at release—no matter how amazing the initial idea might be.
In this area we’ve fallen short in 2023/2024 with releases that suffered from technical performance and similar issues. It’s in this area that we’ve focused a lot in the latter half of 2024: part of it comes down to the arcane inner workings of a corporate entity; ensuring that our processes are up to snuff, that we have checks and balances in place, that we have an outstanding assessment and management of risks, the right people in the right places…you know the drill. This corporateness aside, the “true” solution is both more simple and a lot more difficult. It comes down to being uncompromising on the quality expected from us, ending games early (or going back to the drawing board) when we notice that the idea or execution is struggling, and most importantly, listening to our players.
I don’t think I can emphasize the last point enough. Our most successful games build on a constant back and forth with many of you. It’s always been a very honest conversation, and we want to sincerely thank you, our community, for all the great feedback and ideas that you give us. We will try to bring in our players and fans at earlier stages of development to ensure that we make the experience that you want, and I think Tinto Talks is a great example of this. On that note, if there are topics that you’d like to hear more about in this type of more corporate leaning communications, please let us know!
Now, looking ahead at 2025, we definitely have content lined up that we’re excited about. Of course we’ve got new expansions (as a surprise to no one) but we also aim to have some new games that are more firmly on our home turf. We hope that this will be a big year for Paradox and we really look forward to it! Thank you for coming along for the ride.
Sincerely,
Fredrik Wester, CEO
Mattias Lilja, Deputy CEO
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