Paradox Rising: Q&A with CEO Fredrik Wester

Paradox CEO Fredrik Wester speaks his mind. He's a vocal critic of DRM technology in PC games, and he caused a bit of a ruckus in 2011 when he mocked Ubisoft for announcing it had the biggest Nintendo 3DS portfolio on the market -- something Wester likened to bragging about having the best typewriters in the world. Still, when I sat down with Wester at last week's Paradox Convention in Iceland, I was surprised at just how frank he was in addressing his own company's most glaring problem: a bad habit of releasing buggy, unfinished, and even flat-out unplayable games. It's an issue Wester promises Paradox has not only addressed, but is prepared to overcome in 2013.


GameSpy: Alternate-history shooter Gettysburg: Armored Warfare was one of the games we looked forward to last year in the office. It was a promising game, but it was completely derailed by a nearly unplayable launch. What happened?

Fred Wester: That was terrible. We did not do our homework. It was a one-man team with some backup… we learned a lot from that release. We've had many bad releases before that, as well, and we learned something every time. In 2012, we also closed four game projects. This happened after Gettysburg. We looked at them and said, "These games are not up to the standards we're currently looking for at Paradox, so we're going to close these projects." We're not going to have any more games that are unplayable at release.


GameSpy: I remember reading that Magnus Mundi had been cancelled, but I had no idea Paradox actually cancelled four projects last year. That's quite a hit for a small publisher.

Fred Wester: We cancelled them all at roughly the same time over the summer. It was a tough summer for us. But sometimes you have to make changes, say, "Okay, this is our new direction, how we're going to work going forward." To see a game that is not up to those standards, you have to be strong enough to cancel it.

GameSpy: That's a big shift from Paradox's past. What made last year the right time to finally start tackling the problem?

Fred Wester: A few years ago, we simply could not afford to cancel games. We needed to release the best product we could release at the time in order to get at least some of the cash we invested back. Today, thanks to the success of games like Magicka and Crusader Kings 2, the Paradox brand is worth so much more that we can actually afford to close projects that don't meet our new quality standards.

GameSpy: What are some of the ways Paradox is making sure its games live up to that new standard?

Fred Wester: An internal quality assurance team has been built over the past year. Previously, we didn't have an internal QA team. Now we have a team of eight dedicated people in-house. We have a dedicated QA team for the Paradox development studio, specifically for the Crusader and Europa games, and we also now work with a number of external QA studios to stress test our multiplayer games, compatibility testing so it runs on different hardware, etc.


We put a lot of effort into increasing the quality of our games, and coming up now you'll see the results. The Dungeonland launch is a good example of what you'll see going forward. It was a first step in the right direction. There were still some minor issues, but it was a quality launch. We also know we'll always run into issues when we launch a network or multiplayer game. Look at Diablo 3, for example, from Blizzard. That was not a good launch, and they have tons of experience with games like World of Warcraft and other very heavy network games.

We're just a small player compared to Blizzard in that regard, but it just proves that it's very hard to anticipate what's going to happen once a game comes out. You can only prepare so much. Patton once said that not even the best combat plan will survive first contact with the enemy, and there's a lot of truth to that. But the bottom line is we are better prepared to face the enemy, or I should say, the customers [laughs].

GameSpy: It's interesting that you mentioned Magicka earlier being one of the games that helped put you in this position. I remember when Magicka launched, it wasn't too pretty on release. Promising, but not a strong release.

Fred Wester: The Magicka launch showed that we always want to be dedicated to our fans. Even if a game has a bad launch, we want to fix the things that are wrong with it. You can fool the gamers a few times, but if you launch product after product without fixing the problems, you're going to lose your fans and your credibility.


Take Europa 3 -- that was a bumpy launch too, back in 2007. Now, it's still one of our top 10 selling games on Steam and it's one of the top 100 played games on Steam. That's six years, 20 patches, and four expansions later. It's a great strategy game, but the launch was far from perfect. We listened to our fans, fixed the problems, and made it a great game.

GameSpy: I suppose it's fitting that Paradox is making this push for quality improvement this year and one of the big games you'll be launching is Europa Universalis 4, a game that helped establish the company. Bit of a coming of age, of sorts.

Fred Wester: We turned into a more mature company in the last few years, mature in many ways. This year, you'll start to see much more even quality to our games that we're releasing, and that's a sign of our coming of age. We're actually in control of the production process in a new way with our third-party developers.

GameSpy: That's a good point. You mentioned what you're doing in-house to improve quality of the Paradox development studio games, what about the third-party stuff?


Fred Wester: When I started in 2005, we had basically no employees. Our first external producer was hired in 2009. Over a year ago, we began building a team to work with our third-party studios, and now there are nine people working with the external devs, changing the quality and scope of our game projects.

It doesn't happen overnight. Changing the quality is like changing the direction of a super tanker; it takes time. But all the effort we've put in over the past year and a half will be showing up now in Q1, and we're really excited to show off what we've done to the public.

GameSpy: So how would you describe this new Paradox Interactive, now in 2013 and moving into the future?

Fred Wester: You'll see fewer and better titles. You'll see a quality improvement. I'm not going to say our games will be more fun -- the fun factor and the quality factor are two different things. Magicka is the perfect example. It was super buggy at launch, but people said, "You have to play this game, there is no other game like this out there." When we write design documents in the office, they all sound like the greatest game of all time. Now, once it gets to vertical slice, we see if it's great or if it's bad, and if it's bad, we'll close it down and move onto the next idea.

That's what you'll see from Paradox – fewer and better titles. The quality improvement is the most important thing we're working on right now.

GameSpy: Thanks for your time!