Paradox CEO Fred Wester drops a truth bomb. Tyranny came in “just under” Paradox’s sales projections, and Wester has a theory about that.
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“The game’s really solid, it still has a lot of interest,” Wester expands. “A lot of people are still on the fence to buy it. I think we will see a long tail on that game with people coming in and playing later on as well. But it didn’t really meet the expectations we set for it initially, no.”[/quote]
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“Obsidian did a great job of capitalising on the timing of Kickstarter and the wave of nostalgia for these type of titles,” goes his hypothesis. “We’ve seen that most of the titles after Pillars of Eternity, if you look at Wasteland, Torment - they haven’t been anywhere near that kind of success. So maybe it’s that a lot of nostalgia fed into the initial bubble and that’s why. These games have a market, but it’s never gonna be that peak [again].”
Jorjani draws a parallel to revivalist point-and-click adventure games and the initial warmth for a fondly remembered genre.
“But once people started playing them, they were like, ‘I kind of know why they aren’t prevalent anymore,’” he says. “This form of gameplay isn’t really working in today’s environment.”[/quote]
Also, although everyone at Paradox and Obsidian say they want to work together again, they acknowledge there were some difficulties.
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Jorjani does volunteer, however, that the two companies have had their “fair share of headbutting” over the course of their working relationship. It sounds as if Stockholm and California came together with a certain amount of chafing.
“I think there are slight cultural differences in how we work,” he theorises. “Sweden is consensus-driven, we try to have very flat hierarchies. It comes back to a lot of different factors but, at least at Paradox, we push a lot of major decisions down to people in the organisation. Not every company works that way. Some companies are not as comfortable with decisions being taken at that level, so they’re pushed upwards. We end up with this weird situation where we can’t have our CEO involved in every discussion.”[/quote]