"Gamers Reject Buggy Game Releases, Publisher Finds"

Following several setbacks, including the cancellation of Life By You and the challenging launch of Cities: Skylines 2, Paradox Interactive has shared insights into how they plan to move forward with a better understanding of player expectations.

Paradox Interactive Explains Recent Games' Cancellation and Delay

Players 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 discussed the evolving attitudes of players towards game launches. In a recent interview with Rock Paper Shotgun during the company's Media Day, Lilja noted that players now have "higher expectations" and are "less trusting" that developers will resolve issues post-launch.

Reflecting on the troubled release of Cities: Skylines 2 last year, Paradox Interactive is now taking a more meticulous approach to addressing game issues. The company believes that involving players earlier in the development process can significantly improve the final product. "If we could have brought players in to try it on a larger scale, that would have helped," Fahraeus remarked about Cities: Skylines 2, expressing a desire for "a larger degree of openness with players" before future game launches.

In response to these insights, Paradox has 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 stated. "But we had quality issues, which means to give the players the game they deserve, we decided to delay it." This decision comes in contrast to the cancellation of their life simulation game, Life By You, which was scrapped due to unmet demands. Lilja clarified that the delay of Prison Architect 2 stems from an inability to maintain the desired development pace, rather than the same issues that led to Life By You's cancellation.

"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 some issues have proven "harder to fix than we thought" during peer reviews and user testing.

In the case of Prison Architect 2, the primary concern 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 further noted that, "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."

Lilja highlighted the competitive nature of the gaming industry, describing it as a "winner-takes-all type of environment," where players are quick to abandon games that don't meet their expectations. He observed that this trend has become more pronounced over the last two years, based on feedback from Paradox's games and market trends.

The launch of Cities: Skylines 2 last year was marred by significant issues, leading to fan backlash and a joint apology from Paradox and developer Colossal Order. They proposed a "fan feedback summit" and delayed the game's first paid DLC due to performance problems. Meanwhile, Life By You was canceled earlier this year after Paradox concluded that further development would not meet the standards expected by both the company and its community. Lilja admitted that some of the challenges they faced were not fully understood initially, acknowledging, "that's totally on us."