Paradox Interactive is the studio that's been bringing us classics like the Europe Universalis, Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron games. The last few years they went from simply making grognard wargaming and strategy titles to launch their own digital distribution platform and publishing a broad selection of other niche oriented gaming titles. All that was enough reason for us to try and get someone to talk about how the heck a small Swedish studio could grow into this behemoth and what the plans for the future are. Shams Jorjani, VP of Business Development made some room in his busy schedule of trying to take over the world to talk to us for a bit.
Paradox Interactive has been around since 1998, right? That’s quite a legacy for a developer. One that has also been more and more successful during these last years. Could you tell us a bit about where Paradox Interactive comes from and where it is heading?
Paradox started off as most developers do - a small team with a weird little game that few others understood. At that time, the company worked with other publishers for marketing/sales/distribution of our games. After a while we realized they weren't really "getting" our games and were pushing them in the same way they would other mainstream titles. So when we finally had a bit of money and could hire another team member the dev team screamed for a new AI programmer. Fredrik Wester, now our CEO, overruled them and hired a marketing person. The devs were naturally fuming and uttered what since has become historical words at Paradox: "who needs marketing - a good game sells itself".
Well, that day Paradox became a publisher and things have pointed upwards ever since. It turns out that understanding what makes a game different from the competition allowed Paradox to better market the games. As they grew as a publisher, they had to start small and publish other 3rd party games that also were "niche". All the games weren't good - but once in a while they made enough money to snowball into bigger and better projects. Thanks to a few runaway hits (and a few solid ones) Paradox today is in a position where we only do projects we really believe in - if it's something we'd enjoy ourselves as niche gamers we know that our crowd will probably like it as well. Going forwards Paradox will continue what we've done all these years - we'll make smart, different and challenging games that demand a lot from the gamers - who in turn demand a lot from the games.
