Paradox Interactive have not had a rosy couple of years. While the company’s core business in grand strategy remains prosperous, their approach to games outside this niche has been mired by delays, cancelations, closures and layoffs. Let’s run through the big setbacks: The Lamplighters League, which we overall liked, was a $22 million financial flop – Paradox have now parted ways with creators Harebrained Studios. Cities Skylines 2 should have been a victory lap, after the success of the first game, but it launched with severe bugs and performance issues. Prison Architect 2, another follow-up to a hit game, has been delayed indefinitely, and Paradox have split from developers Double Eleven. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is borderline vapourware: originally announced in 2019 with Hardsuit Labs at the helm, it’s currently in the hands of The Chinese Room, and was recently delayed for the umpteenth time into 2025.
And then there’s the abrupt cancellation of Life By You, a life management sim designed to compete directly with The Sims 4, and the closure of its creators Paradox Tectonic. Writing-down the development of Life By You cost Paradox around 208 million krona, or $19.2 million. It was the primary contributor to a 90% decrease in the company’s operating profit for the second quarter of 2024, versus the same quarter in 2023.
Paradox recently invited journalists to a Media Day in London, seeking to reset perceptions and explore what they’ve learned from this run of disasters. I have a few stories from that event, which we’ll run over the next week or two, but above all, I wanted to ask about Life By You. Announced barely a year before cancellation in March 2023 with a former EA boss at the helm, it was an undisguised attempt to usurp The Sims, with a host of ambitious elements such as context-sensitive generated dialogue. I thought it made a lot of sense for Paradox to try its hand at a life sim – a genre that can be as system-led as grand strategy, but with a lighter, more approachable format that might have lured in players who aren’t massive history buffs.
In an interview at the event, Paradox’s deputy chief executive officer Mattias Lilja agreed that Life By You was a “strategically sensible project” for Paradox, adding that the company haven’t given up on the life sim genre. “It makes sense to us strategically, finding that core team who want to do that game for us is a really good idea, and I think we should try again, if we have a similar opportunity,” he told me.
Next time, however, Paradox need to make smaller investments at the outset and be prepared for a longer spell in prototyping, Lilja went on. “We need to do it a different way. We need to start with a smaller team. We need to do pre-production longer. We need to prototype a lot, before we go into big production, because when you have a full game team, quite honestly, it costs a lot, so any pivot is going to cost all of that.”
The game’s relative expense meant it had to show significant progress faster than the developers could manage, Lilja said. “We were not getting the game we wanted, and the burn rate and cost was really high at that point, which is on us as a publisher. The devs did everything they could, but there were lots of them, so any major change would just put us more into [debt]. We were digging a hole that was just getting deeper. That’s why we had to stop it, and we didn’t really see any other option. It’s not like you can change dev team – we have to stop now.”
The game’s problems were too fundamental to iron out in early access, Lilja added. “If we thought people would be happy, we would have released it, but we were certain that they wouldn’t. So we had to stop.”
Paradox’s chief creator officer Henrik Fåhraeus echoed much of this in a separate interview at the event. “The thing with that game is we saw a lot of problems for a long time,” he said of Life By You. Fåhraeus touched briefly on the game’s graphics being “not good enough” for Paradox leadership, but added that Life By You’s issues were more “big picture”.
“What is the player experience going to be like, is it going to be better than Sims 4 in some way, at least?” he said. “And the unfortunate answer to that is that I didn’t feel it would be, and the other people who tested it were of sort of the same opinion.
“So, it’s not about single points of failure, if you will, it’s more the big picture experience of playing the game, and even in early access, you need to have a really solid experience that is fun and bug-free. It can be a little thin on content, sure, that’s not the big problem. It’s having that really fun experience playing. The game needs to be there.”
Like Lilja, Fåhraeus thinks Paradox have a future in the life sim genre. “The greenlighting of Life By You was perfectly reasonable, I think,” he said. “It does kind of fit our pillars in many ways.” While Fåhraeus acknowledges that life sims are “less challenging” than the grand strategy sims Paradox have a reputation for, he argues they rely on a similar mix of the “cerebral” and “creativity”. “So a life sim made sense, and perhaps still make sense,” he concluded.
All this will likely make sour reading for people who used to work at Paradox Tectonic. Some of the laid-off developers have spoken out publicly against the cancellation, insisting that the game was in better shape than advertised. In June this year, a few months after Life By You was delayed indefinitely, game designer Willem Delventhal aired his frustrations on LinkedIn, claiming that development was going “extremely well” before Paradox suspended launch for the final time.
“I cannot share specific numbers, but I can say that we had an internal metric we were aiming for that had been approved, and that we exceeded that number by a significant portion,” he wrote. “We also got a thumbs up a few weeks before launch.”
According to Delventhal, the developers “spent a month in purgatory” after release was postponed indefinitely, during which “we did everything we could to prove to them we were worth launching, including things like finding potential buyers or suggesting cutting ties and going indie. We heard virtually nothing back.”
When I asked Lilja what he thought of these comments, he declined to go into much depth. “I’m going to try and not get into that,” he said. “I’m going to own up to what we as publishers did, and try not to comment too much on the dev side. I understand that they have their view, and I might agree or not, but it’s mostly because I don’t want to get into a fight, throwing stuff between us and devs. I don’t think that’s helpful for anyone.
“But I can tell you that the game was not what we needed it to be. The promise that they talked about, that people got excited about, was not the game that we were looking at. And there were many different reasons, and I’m going to own up that we did not control or help them steer that in a good way – that’s on us.”
Look out for more stories on Prison Architect 2, The Lamplighter’s League, Bloodlines 2 and Paradox’s grand strategy operations at large in the days to come.