In an interview with GameSpy , Paradox's CEO Frederik Wester has revealed that the publisher cancelled four games in the past year, in an attempt to ensure that consumers weren't paying for buggy or unfinished titles.
Wester's comments were in response to questioning about the much maligned alternate history Civil War RTS Gettysburg: Armoured Warfare. Wester said, "That was terrible. We did not do our homework. It was a one-man team with some backup... we learned a lot from that release. We've had many bad releases before that, as well, and we learned something every time."
"In 2012, we also closed four game projects. This happened after Gettysburg. We looked at them and said, 'These games are not up to the standards we're currently looking for at Paradox, so we're going to close these projects.' We're not going to have any more games that are unplayable at release."
Gettysburg wasn't the only Paradox title in recent history to launch in an unfinished state. Both Magicka and Sword of the Stars 2 were released with significant problems. Wester admits that previously, Paradox couldn't risk the financial hit of cancelling projects. "We needed to release the best product we could release at the time in order to get at least some of the cash we invested back."
The success of Magicka and Crusader Kings 2 has put Paradox in a position were they can afford to be more diligent. "An internal quality assurance team has been built over the past year," Wester says. "Previously, we didn't have an internal QA team. Now we have a team of eight dedicated people in-house. We have a dedicated QA team for the Paradox development studio, specifically for the Crusader and Europa games, and we also now work with a number of external QA studios to stress test our multiplayer games, compatibility testing so it runs on different hardware, etc."
Wester closes by saying, "That's what you'll see from Paradox – fewer and better titles. The quality improvement is the most important thing we're working on right now."
Thanks, VG247 .
