If you ask whether Paradox Interactive would have liked to have published MMO World of Tanks and surprise hit The Banner Saga, then surely they’d jump at the chance? Not so, reveals VP of acquisition, Shams Jorjani.
Paradox actually had the opportunity to sign them but didn’t ”due to them not matching our pillars,” they explained. CEO Fred Wester adds they ”weren’t sure about the business model” for World of Tanks.
”These games were essentially filtered out, in part, due to them not matching our pillars,” said Jorjani. ”The Banner Saga is a wonderful game, I love it, it’s one of the most gorgeous games I’ve ever seen, but it’s not a Paradox game. It doesn’t have the depth that we were looking for at the time. There’s a lot of money to be made in a lot of games, but it’s not always our money to make.”
As for World of Tanks, the other issue was not having the money they’d need at the time. ”I didn’t have the money to pay up,” admitted Wester. ”I was really thrilled by the idea, but we weren’t sure about the business model, either, because we haven’t tried that before.”
Today the Wargaming MMO commands legions of fans and has expanded into planes and warships.
Paradox also discussed their less-than-successful decisions to publish certain titles, and admits perhaps at times they’ve bitten off a little more than they should have, but they’d do it all again.
”It doesn’t always work out. But there are other examples of one-man armies making games with weird ideas that actually pan out and end up costing Microsoft a lot of money! But I’m glad we made that chance. I’m not saying that it had the potential to become a Minecraft; perhaps if we had done it quite differently and started smaller and not with multiplayer, it would have been a good idea.”
”These are all games that I’d say haven’t done tremendously well for us, but I’m really proud that we signed them, and I would sign them again,” Wester explained. ”The problem is not that we signed these games, it was we did a lot of things at the same time.”
”Doing a new genre, with a new team, with a new technology, on a new platform, on a new IP at the same time as a growing organisation - probably not the best thing. Maybe just do two of these. A lot of these ideas inherently were sound at the time.”
Today Paradox has signed Obsidian Entertainment’s highly anticipated RPG The Pillars of Eternity, which took Kickstarter by storm and started life as ‘Project Eternity’. It finished with pledges just shy of $4 million from almost 74k backers. Let’s all hope this turns out to be a great move.
