The Wester Front
Paradox Interactive CEO Fredrik Wester on company growth, downloadable platforms and social media
Paradox Interactive has quietly gone about building up quite a reputation in the videogames industry, growing from a developer of high strategy PC games to a publisher for a range of titles, as well as spilling out into digital distribution platform Gamersgate - now a separate company.
Here, company CEO Fredrik Wester talks about the business in the past year, the forthcoming expansion from PC-only onto downloadable console platforms, and offers his thoughts on how social media might play a part in future games.
From the perspective of the number of units sold, we've never sold more on the PC than we did in 2009, so you could say that the rumours of the death of the PC are greatly exaggerated. Digital download has really come in as a big commercial thing for us - 2010 will be the first year where we earn more money on digital download then we do in retail revenue, which is huge for us. It was around 40 per cent in 2009, so this year we're going even more towards digital.
I think the reason for the growth on the PC market, that's happening on traditional PC games, is because a lot of pirates are being converted into paying users. If you take services like Steam and Gamersgate (that I was a part of founding in 2006), there's better accessibility, it's easier to download, there are services connected to the legitimate purchases - and that's led to less piracy.
I don't think there's a revival for PC gaming, or that the number of users are actually increasing - but that's how I see it, at least.
That's right - we've come from a niche. But there are a few games we're publishing this year that are a step away from the types of games we've traditionally published - however, in our niche we're pretty much the only company left, so we're able to dominate the map-based strategy genre. It's kind of small, but we're doing good business on it.
The recent purchase of AGEOD, the French company that basically make the same games we do, was strategically very important for both companies. They didn't want to engage too much in the publishing - and Paradox as an umbrella for niche strategy games is growing as well.
It's like taking baby steps - we're not launching big triple-A console titles, where we print Xbox games and ship them to stores. We're starting with download platforms - PlayStation Network and hopefully XBLA as well - and that way we're reducing risk.
'Best in class' is a term that I want to use - so a game has to deliver something great. We can't ever go into the Elder Scrolls territory, because we'd need a budget of about $50 million to try, and we don't have that kind of money. So we're looking for games that have an edge - some sort of attitude - and that can be delivered right to gamers.