Patch Culture: Gamers Demand Flawless Releases

Paradox Interactive Thoroughly Explains Recent Games' Cancellation and DelayPlayers Have Expectations, and Some Technical Problems are Hard to Fix

Mattias Lilja, CEO of Cities: Skylines 2 publisher Paradox Interactive, along with CCO Henrik Fahraeus, has commented on players' attitudes towards game launches. Speaking to Rock Paper Shotgun during the company's recent Media Day, Lilja said that players have "higher expectations" and are "less trusting" that game developers will fix issues after a game gets released.

Learning from their experience with last year's disastrous release of Cities: Skylines 2, the publisher has expressed that it is being more meticulous with sorting out problems found in their games. The publisher is also of the opinion that players need to have earlier access to the game to gather feedback that can aid with development. "If we could have brought players in to try it on a larger scale, that would have helped," Fahraeus said about Cities: Skylines 2, adding that they hope to have "a larger degree of openness with players," prior to launching a game.

In line with this, Paradox decided to indefinitely delay its jail management simulator, Prison Architect 2. "We're pretty confident that the gameplay [of Prison Architect 2] is good," Lilja said. "But we had quality issues, which means to give the players the game they deserve, we decided to delay it." And with the recent cancellation of their life sim game, Life By You, due to unmet demads, Lilja additionally clarified that the indefinitely delay is because they just haven't been "able to keep the pace" they wanted.

quot;So it's not the same kind of bucket of challenges that we had with Life By You, which led to cancellation," he explained. "It's more that we haven't been able to keep the pace that we wanted," adding that they've found some issues "harder to fix than we thought" when Paradox does "peer reviews of the game and user testing and whatnot."

In Prison Architect 2's case, the problem is "mostly certain technical issues rather than design," Lilja said. "It's more how can we make this technically high-quality enough for a stable release." He added, "It's also based on the fact that we, in all transparency, see that fans right now, with a squeezed budget for games, have higher expectations, and are less accepting that you will fix things over time."

According to the CEO, with the gaming space being a "winner-takes-all type of environment," players are likely to drop "most games" quite quickly. He added, "and this is even more pronounced now, [during] maybe the last two years. That's at least what we read from our games, and also from from others in the market."

Cities: Skylines 2 launched last year with problems so bad that fan backlash prompted the publisher and developer Colossal Order to issue a joint apology, subsequently proposing a "fan feedback summit." The game's first paid DLC was also delayed due to major performance issues during its launch. Meanwile, Life By You was axed earlier this year, as they had ultimately decided that further development on the game would not bring it up to the standards of both Paradox and its player community. Though, Lilja later explained that some of the problems they've faced were issues that they rather "had not really understood fully," so "that's totally on us." he added.