RPS: Good GDC, Fred?

Wester: It was great. A lot of people came to see us, even people we didn’t expect. I think a lot of those came because of the Magicka Vietnam trailer, and they wanted to see if we had something playable. We didn’t, but we had the Arrowhead CEO with us so he spoke to everyone and I think that was okay.

RPS: Magicka Vietnam makes a lot of sense to me, but how did it come about?

Wester: Well it was the CEO of Arrowhead, Johan, who said that all games have a Vietnam expansion. And he’s right: all games should have a Vietnam expansion. So we made one for Magicka.

RPS: Can we expect to see Vietnam expansions for Crusader Kings and Sword Of The Stars?

Wester: Sure! I will need to talk to the development teams about that, of course, but I wouldn’t completely rule it out…

RPS (trying to imagine what a Vietcong spacecraft would look like): Okay! In terms of other games you have got a busy year, as the GDC showing seemed to underline…

Wester: Oh absolutely, we have a great variety of games coming out, and we showed a number of titles at GDC. Pirates Of The Black Cove is looking particularly interesting, because it’s a blend of the old East India company games and something with a little more RPG action. You’ve seen that, of course. Fans of the old Pirates! franchise – and I am one of those – will get a kick out of this game, I am sure.

RPS: Yes, and it does look interesting in a piratey-gang Diablo sort of way.

Wester: Then we have Mount & Blade, too, which will have a new version with Fire And Sword. As well as new games we have a lot of expansions and extra content for existing games, such as those for Magicka, Hearts Of Iron III, and others. It’s going to be a big year!

RPS: Yes, and it seems like you are starting to diversify. I still see people in our comments threads saying “hey Paradox, try publishing other than historical strategy!” But the truth is you are already making in-roads into other territories. Dreamlords is an MMORTS, even. How did that one come about?

Wester: That was just a great opportunity. I think it suited us because it’s a hardcore RTS, but it really came about by chance. It’s being developed by a Swedish developer who were running it on their own, and they wanted some marketing backup. That’s the main part of it for us. It’s the kind of game that needs a big kick to get it going, and we are trying to push it through our channels to make that happen.

RPS: Oh and Sword Of The Stars II! I missed that at GDC, unfortunately, but it’s looking promising.

Wester: Yes, that should be this year, too. It’s slated for August, but I wouldn’t take that as being set in stone…

RPS: It seems like a fairly ambitious step onwards from the last game. I suppose you are soon going to be telling us about how it’s pushing 4X in a new, exciting direction?

Wester: Well we like to think so, but too many companies cry wolf too often. We do it too! I try to restrain myself from saying that much about pushing boundaries or things like that, but I still think that this genre has not had a lot going on in for three or four years. I’d like to think that we can deliver the spiritual successor to the Masters Of Orion series. That’s a big part of the ambition we have for the game. I am biased of course, when I say that, because that’s my personal favourite, the Masters Of Orion games. I really love them! Sword Of The Starts II is a game that I – as an old 4X gamer – am really excited about.

RPS: Just going back to the new Mount & Blade game – what’s the deal with that? Hasn’t it already been released before in Eastern Europe?

Wester: It’s actually been kind of a mess. First they made a mod, and then they made a game out of it based on the original Mount & Blade, and then another based on Mount & Blade Warband! But the game you will see out in the West is a polished version of that. It has eight more months of quality on there, and it’s much closer to how TaleWorlds want it to be. They’ve put a lot of work in there.

RPS: I’ve always been a bit surprised by the enthusiasm for Mount & Blade – does the intense interest from the community ever surprise you?

Wester: Well these are the kinds of games that just keep you interested because of the way they play. If you take the Mount & Blade series as an example, then you can see why people keep on playing, because it rewards those who go back to it and find more, and master more of it. Lots of different games have their own ways of providing that kind of gameplay – just look at Minecraft – but I think these games have a certain mechanic that is fun and rewarding. I think that’s what a lot of studios actually forget about: making games! I play a lot of games that look really good, but I have no reason to go back to them. I won’t mention any names, but I think these games are throwaway.

If we made Mount & Blade more beautiful – if we made it look like the new Battlefield 3 trailer for example – it would cost a hell of a lot of money, and would probably sell a little more, but we don’t think like that, we can’t think like that. Instead we think we have an opportunity to challenge that way of doing things.

RPS: Speaking of challenging the way things are done, Magicka is quite an unusual release in many ways… And unusually buggy, too, perhaps? How do you feel about the launch of that now, looking back?

Wester: With the tech that we built upon and the group of students who were working so hard on that game… well, let’s say that we were not surprised that it was buggy on release, we just knew we’d have to keep putting time and resources into the game after release. It’s in somewhat good shape now, I think. But remember that working with a first-time team is hard, because it’s tough to plan the time, to plan the goals. What they say and what we see might not be the same thing. But also these first-time teams have crazy ideas and those fill up the game. That’s what we are so happy about with Magicka, because the action is funny and strange, and for something to be different, well, that is a great achievement for a first-time team releasing a ten-dollar game.

RPS: We often debate how finished games should be, and this issue comes up every few months. It seems to me that people are willing to take it case-by-case, though. I mean the reaction of Magicka being unfinished was quite different to the reaction to other games I could mention. Was it down to the price? Or something else in terms of expectations?

Wester: Oh it’s a mix of those things. We didn’t try to hype the game, and that set the expectations at a certain level. The price point was $10, and how angry can you be at having spent $10? The reaction was firstly “oh, it is buggy”, and we said “right, we’re going to fix it”. I’ve seen other studios say “no, it’s finished”, or “it’s not buggy” about their games that two weeks later get patched. We just accepted that and got on with it. And we patched every day for a week, which was a difficult thing to do, because how can you be sure that one patch is better than the one from the day before, but it’s done and now we are adding even more content. Other companies need to admit that their games are buggy on release, because the gamers have to live with it. If you don’t start dealing with problems right away then you lose respect. As a developer you have to react quickly and responsibly. Always be polite, and always write things on the forums that you’d be happy for your mom to read.

RPS: Sound advice for everyone on the internet, there. So, moving on, what’s happening with Paradox Connect? I saw you guys announce your social networking functions, but I’ve not seen it in any games yet?

Wester: Dreamlords is the first game that has Paradox Connect fully integrated. We want to integrate all titles with it, so that there are achievements and so on available for all games. People ask me “are you going to use that to compete with Steam?” But that’s just ridiculous, we are complimenting Steam, and nothing else. We want to serve gamers and give them the kind of functionality that they are looking for. This allows us to do that without relying on anyone else.

RPS: But it’s not a framework or DRM like GFWL, is it? It’s just an optional extension?

Wester: No, Connect is not mandatory. If you want the achievements, avatars and so on, then you have to use it. But you don’t need to log into it to get to the game. We don’t ever want to hide our game behind different DRM systems like Ubisoft or whoever seem to need to do. We just don’t work like that.

RPS: So you aren’t using DRM in any way?

Wester: We don’t use any DRM. We do however use Steam installers sometimes, but we’re not using that as an anti-piracy DRM. Actually we are using it as a way to make sure that our distributors actually pay us money. We’ve had problems with that in the past with box products, and not being paid, so having control of the Steam framework means we can turn off all the games in a certain channel and that puts pressure on distributors to pay up. That’s the whole story. Steam is not a DRM for us. Some people don’t like Steam, and I respect that, but it’s been useful to defend ourselves from unpaid distributor bills.

RPS: So do you worry about piracy?

Wester: It’s a non-issue. A lot of pirates have been converted by Steam and GamersGate. Most people want to pay for games, and most of them do. As long as we make money and have a great business I won’t worry about it. The only thing that pisses me off is when people claim they have a “right” to be able to pirate and download a game. Apart from that, I don’t worry about it. That might change if we have a heavily pirated game, maybe. We’ll see. Haha.

RPS: That seems like a positive attitude. Oh, there was one other thing I wanted to ask you about: you tweeted grumpily that you weren’t invited to the strategy game panel at GDC? Yet most of the panel members mentioned Paradox as “an interesting mid-level company”, how do you feel about that?

Wester: It’s certainly better than being characterised as an interesting small-scale strategy company! I see it as a good thing. It was a good thing, a really good thing. The guy from Robot Entertainment, for example, was citing us as an example of how games should be more complex, and I like that. Grumpy, though? Maybe that is the right word. But you know if it’s a discussion of strategy games on PC, and me and three producers were in San Francisco anyway, you know, invite us! Come on, guys. On the other hand I won’t be grumpy about it in a year – I am just giving them a heads up for next time.

RPS: That point about complexity is important, isn’t it? I keep running into journalists, gamers, and developers who are all pointing to these kinds of games, or things like Men Of War, as an example of how they are getting more out of complex games. Is that one of Paradox’s tasks, to supply those kinds of needs?

Wester: Yes, providing more complex gameplay is Paradox’s task. What we need to be better at is to make gamers feel better about playing those games. Some games published by us are really punishing. We need to make sure that the first couple of hours of games like, say Hearts Of Iron, run a little more smoothly. I think if we can do that without sacrificing any depth or complexity, well, that has to be the goal. And we have come a long way, but there is still a long way to go.

RPS: Thanks for your time.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/16/right-a-chat-with-paradoxs-fred-wester/#more-54115

I am really starting to like this guy, he talks straight and has oppnions on DRM and games that I like. We need more publishers like Paradox IMO

that part about Steam/DRM was interesting, I had never heard about this sort of problems before.

the good thing about Paradox is that they expanded as a publisher, but their core development team keeps doing what they're good at (although HOI3 launch was quite bumpy).

here is an older interview 

RPS: So, early today you mentioned that when you heard GameStop were launching their own digital download service, you wanted to get in touch with them and tell them some of the lessons you learned the hard way.

FW: Yeah, it’s been a rough ride. Starting up an online retailer without knowing anything about retail? The thing is, with boxed retail, it’s all transaction based. They want you to come to their store, and then they never want to hear from you again. They can’t take care of the technical back-end, they can’t take care of the patches, they don’t really understand the full lifecycle of the game. That’s the first lesson they need to learn- “How do I provide gamers with a service after I get the transaction?”

It’s the most important thing to learn, but it’s also the hardest thing to learn. It’s a totally different… ah, paradigm. I love the word paradigm. I use it every time I can.

I actually had six different bulletpoints- “Things GameStop has to learn”. Kinda bombastic, right? I’m not gonna contact them though.

RPS: What else have you learned?

FW: You learn a lot about how other publishers work, about their opinions on the games, and you learn a lot about gamer behaviour. We ask the users on GamesGate a lot of questions, not just about the kind of games they prefer but how they like to download their games and how they want the experience to work. I think I’ve learned a lot about service. Paradox as a publisher doesn’t meet that many gamers. Except on the forums, where we’re only ever flamed or praised.

RPS: Still. Paradox, as a publisher, is quite close to its customers. [I’m referring here to Paradox’s use of fan-created content in its games and its happy support for modders.]

FW: We try to be close to our customers, without making it sound like bullshit. Because “close to our customers” can easily turn into corporate bullshit. But we want to be out there and discuss the features of our games, and get the feedback. I mean Hell, we’re just under 30 people working for Paradox, including our in-house development team and sales. It’s kind of a small company, and we sell hundreds of thousands of games every year, so collectively our gamers know far more about our games than we do in general.

RPS: It’s a very active community.

FW: I think a game like Victoria 2, for example, there’s just so much to discuss. The most popular part of our forum is still the After Action Reports, where people describe what they did in the game with screenshots and everything. And some of these are pure gold. It’s like reading a book. There’s not so many games where you can discuss for years and years how to play the game.

RPS: But that kind of complexity’s fallen off the game shelves recently. Why do you think that is?

FW: I think it’s the same as what happened in the film industry during the 60s and 70s, when all the indie guys were pushed off the shelves and only the big 5 were left. What’s been a blessing for the games industry is that at this point, digital distribution’s come into the equation as well, and we’re selling a lot of indie titles that otherwise would have received zero recognition. Take Minecraft. No publisher would ever touch, but the guy who created it probably made a lot of money anyway, and made a lot of gamers happy.

So, it doesn’t bother me that our games are being pushed off the shelves. We’re still shifting a Hell of a lot of units. It’s just moved online.

RPS: There’s some frustration building in the UK over the government’s lack of support for the games industry. How’s the Swedish government treatment of you?

FW: Politicians talk a lot and they do little. I think the problem’s universal. Of course it’s tough, because Canada has a head start with all the tax cuts, and luring over different development teams. We actually work with two teams in Canada.

Sweden has a policy of funding things like movies. I think the Swedish government gives $100 million each year to Swedish-specific movies, and most of them are never exported. They’re just exposed to the 9 million people in Sweden. All politicians in Sweden are very confused that we have development studios that sell games to a worldwide audience, and I don’t think they consider games “good enough” from a cultural perspective to receive funding.

They’ve been very slow in supporting us. They always come to our meetings and say “We wanna support you guys”, and I tell them that the two best way to support us is to put money into education for programmers, graphic artists and designers, and to provide tax cuts. But if you mention tax cuts to a Social Democrat, they will just throw you out of the room. The discussion ends there.

I read a report in the Harvard Business Review that the most important factor for entrepreneurship is lowering the capital tax. So, maybe it’s as simple as it.

RPS: But Paradox has experienced tremendous growth recently, no?

FW: We’ve grown ten times over in terms of gross revenue since 2004. And we spawned Gamers Gate, which is doing really great as well.

RPS: What do you put that growth down to?

FW: We’ve been very focused. We haven’t been lured into doing… Nintendo DS stuff. We haven’t got caught up in that “We have to be on console now!”

We’ve sold our games. We have our fans. We know what games they like. We know what games we want to produce. We’ve just added more games to the portfolio instead of spreading it out over consoles, which is actually a very high-risk business. If you release a box at retail you have to pay a licensing fee upfront for every game you print. You have to try and get the development fee back, and the license fee. And you don’t have control over everything either. MS and Sony need to have their seal of approval over everything.

RPS: So you’re shifting away from boxed products?

FW: I think this year we plan to have between 60 and 70 percent of our revenue as digital downloads. Course, releasing a title like Lead & Gold which is digital only helps with that equation, but when we release boxed games we expect the sales to be 50/50, boxed and digital.

RPS: And of course you recently unveiled Paradox Connect. Does everybody have to have achievements now, then?

FW: Yeah yeah yeah. Part of me agrees with you. If everyone launches their own service then you’re going to have 28 different people to work with for every game. But we just wanted the whole experience to be seamless. As much as I like Steam- I use Steam myself- I know a lot of people are turned off by the fact that you need to install a client. We’re completely web-based and voluntarily used. You can just play the game as normal, and if you want to connect your forum name to the service you’re welcome to.

We have a lot of exciting stuff planned for Paradox Connect that we just can’t talk about right now, because we don’t want to over-promise and underdeliver.

RPS: The whole thing mirrors your stance on DRM, which all Paradox games are free of, right?

FW: Yes. We left DRM three years ago. We saw that DRM caused crashes, made it harder for people to install the game on their machines, and we don’t want to put boundaries around people who’ve actually bought our game. If you purchase it, it’s yours, and you can do whatever you want with it. Ach- not, whatever you want- you can’t, like, create… you should be able to install it on multiple machines and download it again if you want to.

If you pirate our game, you probably get bad karma anyway. That’s our only DRM. Bad karma.

RPS: Have you employed a witch doctor yet?

FW: We’re thinking about it. We have a Sami population in Sweden which are an indigenous people living up North, and since I’m from that area I’m pretty well connected with all the medicine men up there.

RPS: I heard you guys were thinking about having negative achievements.

FW: Right.

RPS: I was talking to the producer outside, there.

FW: Right. Tom.

RPS: He said that you’d have some negative achievements to do with things like…

FW: Right.

RPS: …playing the developers at the game.

FW: Right.

RPS: You haven’t heard about this.

FW: Right.

RPS: Have you?

FW: Nope.

[Laughter]

RPS: Right! Moving on…

FW: I’m always the last one to know in our office, though sometimes it’s the opposite as well. At the press conference this morning I was like- Reena (she’s our Vice President of sales)! He’s going to present a game you’ve never seen before! Don’t kill me! Like, how’s she meant to sell a game she’s never heard of?

I’m not surprised a company like Microsoft has bad communications. There’s thousands of people there. We’re a company of thirty and we still can’t communicate.

RPS: What does Paradox have in store for next year?

FW: We’re releasing three new free-to-play games next year. We’re experimenting and we’re not sure how it’ll turn out- we’re not sure of our business model yet, but we have a few very exciting online games coming out.

RPS: Are they existing brands?

FW: No. Wait-

RPS: …!

FW: Well. Nah. But one of the games is… something… how do I put this? It’s gonna be very cryptic. It’s a type of gameplay that we’ve never touched before. And it’s a type of gameplay that’s completely different from what a computer game typically offers. We’re gonna announce it at mid-September, and I promise you, you’ll be the first to know, because I think it fits your audience very well. You have a lot of nerds.

RPS: We have a lot of nerds, yes. I mean, we are a lot of nerds.

FW: Fantastic. I love it. You know, I always read the comments on your site. There’s a nerdy, academic humour that I really like. I’ve actually commented anonymously a few times. I would never say “Fred Wester, CEO of Paradox”. Or maybe I will! Or someone else should start doing it in my time.

[The RPS readership should consider this a mass call to start leaving at least one comment from “Fred Wester, CEO of Paradox” on every single post.]

RPS: So, you let a girl from IGN shave your head during E3 because you got the advance figures as to how well Victoria 2 was selling.

FW: Yes. Also, I’d played the game and thought it was very solid. I have to say that, as I’m the CEO and I can’t sit here telling you it was a shit game, but after the Hearts of Iron 3 release which we say was really unstable- we weren’t really proud of that release, and thought we could do a much better job- I think we’ve improved our QA internally.

RPS: If Ship Simulator Extremes sells really well, what would you be willing to let a member of RPS shave off you?

FW: I could… I could shave my legs, for example. How do you do that? Waxing. You could wax, perhaps, half a leg?

RPS: Half?!

FW: I have pretty hairy legs, you know. That’s a bad thing. But yeah, you give me a sales figure and I could get you some exclusive footage.

RPS: Grainy footage of you shaving some part of your body.

FW: Or I’d have a body stand-in, like they do in Hollywood.

RPS: I’d know, Fred! I’d know.

FW: Ah.

RPS: Thanks for your time.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/09/01/right-said-fred-fredrik-wester-interview/