Paradox Interactive seems from the outside like a company run by dice rolls, as was the case earlier this year when it canceled Sims competitor Life By You and shuttered its developers a few weeks after it missed the project’s release date.
“It is clear that we made the wrong decisions in several projects, especially outside our core business, and this must change,” writes CEO Fredrik Wester in the financial report published today.
“We are ending the second quarter of the year with mixed feelings. On the one hand, our core business did very well, but on the other hand, we made the difficult decision to cancel the release of Life by You because the game would not be able to meet our expectations,” Wester writes in half-year report.
Due to a write-off of development costs of 208 million kronor (around £14.9 million) for Life By You, operating profit in the second quarter of 2024 fell by 90% year-on-year. Paradox Interactive still turned a profit thanks to powerful results from what it considers its “core games”, including recent expansions released for games such as Stellaris, Victoria 3 and Europa Universalis IV.
Wester writes that the publisher “has made significant changes to the way we invest in riskier projects, meaning that as of 2021, we have not launched new projects with the same combination of high risk and high cost as Life by You.”
Life By You isn’t the only troubled project to land under Paradox’s wing in recent years. Cities: Skylines 2 was a highly anticipated sequel to a beloved game, but it shipped with bugs, performance issues, and design choices that alienated many players. Lamplighters League was a $22 million flop that led to layoffs and the parting of ways with longtime development partner Harebrained Schemes. Bloodlines 2 has been languishing in development hell for years, only recently returning under the stewardship of The Chinese Room. Prison Architect 2 — somehow not mentioned in that financial report at all — was delayed from May to September, causing longtime development partner Double Eleven to leave the project and a recent studio to come on board to finish the game.
Wester tries to paint a positive lithe on a challenging quarter, noting that “internally developed core games continue to deliver good content that players have appreciated,” but ugh. You’d think the dice rolls wouldn’t come up so many times in a row.
