Why developing I:R 2 when you can come back to I:R

[Snow Crystal]

One possibility for why they might choose a sequel over continuing development is the developer team is almost certainly going to be different. There are some ex-IR devs at Paradox still, but they've been working on other games for a few years now and may be invested in those projects. There's a real possibility some of them won't want to switch back to an IR-related project, and I have no idea how many of them have left the company.

At this point, about 50% of the people working on 2.0 at the Stockholm studio have left, and everyone except one person from the Thalassic studio. Those of us who are still here have usually gained relatively high seniority or some kind of lead positions at one of the other games. With the way studios work at Paradox nowadays, it's incredibly unlikely that all the ex-IR devs could up and leave those projects for any reason, particularly for something like Imperator.