Grand strategist

Paradox's Mattias Lilja addresses the publisher's recent difficulties - and the plan to right the ship

- Mattias Lilja

Even by the standards of the videogame industry’s past few years, Paradox Interactive has not had a great 2024. At the year’s start, its slate was led by three games that seemed to push the Swedish publisher outside of its traditional grand-strategy niche. There was Life By You, a competitor to The Sims headed up by that series’ former EA boss, Rod Humble; Prison Architect 2, continuing the hit management sim series, to which Paradox had acquired the rights in 2019; and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, a long-gestating followup to the cult RPG.

In May, two weeks before its intended early-access release date, Life By You was delayed indefinitely; that was followed by confirmation that the game had been cancelled, and Tectonic – the California-based in-house studio Paradox had formed to make it – was being shut down. All this came just weeks after news that longtime Prison Architect steward Double Eleven was no longer going to be working on the sequel, which would instead be handled by Brazilian support studio Kokku. And Bloodlines 2 has been pushed back to 2025, giving The Chinese Room a chance to finish the game it had inherited from original developer Hardsuit Labs, removed from the project back in 2021.

To have one bad year may be regarded as misfortune, perhaps. But looking slightly further back, at 2023’s launches – The Lamplighters League, which performed so poorly that Paradox divested the studio on New Year’s Day, and seemingly sure bet Cities: Skylines II, which was brought low by technical difficulties – it’s hard not to ask: where did it all go wrong? And so, sitting down with Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja, we do.

There’s no denying that it’s been a difficult period for Paradox Interactive. Having been with the company since 2009, where do you think it all went wrong?