We chatted with CEO Fredrik Wester and COO Susana Meza of Paradox Interactive at PDXCON this month, and an interesting musing came up. What if Crusader Kings II was in the e-sports arena?
Not that anything would come of it, but Wester notes e-sports today is where ”something is happening all the time,” but a lot of people watch golf, so could Crusader Kings II find an audience?
”…how would we develop Crusader Kings if it was an e-sport? If we totally built it into an e-sport. The way e-sports are built up right now is that you only have ice hockey, basketball, action-type games. Quick, ten to thirty minute games where something is happening all the time,” Wester said.
”I’d say Crusader Kings 2 could be the golf of e-sports. If you watch golf, it’s very, very slow. Like the guy’s slowly walking to the next hole, thinking about which club he’s going to pick. Very slow. Or something like the Tour de France. They’re cycling for like two hours or something in a row.”
There’s plenty of Youtube channels with sizeable subscription numbers that pull in regular audiences for their Let’s Play marathons in the strategy and simulation genres. ”There is a big audience out there,” he agreed. The trick might be to sex it up Game of Thrones style…
We also talked about the now cancelled Runemaster project, which was ”never meant to be an RPG,” admitted Shams Jorjani, VP of acquisitions. ”That’s why we ended up where we ended up. The original brief was ‘Europa Universalis in a fantasy setting’. Fred and I were thinking, OK that’s just going to print money. Let’s do it. Then it rolled into something else.”
Paradox really tried to make it work, but in the end it ”just wasn’t fun,” said COO Susana Meza.
”That idea, of fantasy grand strategy? We’d love to do that. An RPG? Let’s not underestimate how much tough work and skill is required in making one,” continued Shams Jorjani.
”For us, one of the realisations we’ve come to over the last few years is what we actually think of as a ‘Paradox game’,” explains Meza. “That means less focus on genre, and more focus on our core pillars.”
”We don’t rule out any genre, if it matches what we as a company focus on, but there are definitely a few that we feel are a great fit for us.”
Check out our full coffee-fuelled chat with Paradox Interactive earlier this month at PDXCON.
