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Cities: Skylines 2 publisher says players 'have higher expectations' today and are 'less accepting' that games will 'fix things over time'
Paradox Interactive acknowledges players' heightened expectations and less tolerance for game bugs, citing the reception to Cities: Skylines 2's performance issues as a key factor in their decision to delay Prison Architect 2 and cancel Life By You. The company also plans to increase transparency with players in the future.
Cities: Skylines 2's publisher thinks that players have developed "higher expectations" of games and are also "less accepting" that they'll be fixed over time.
That's according to Paradox Interactive deputy chief executive officer Mattias Lilja, who spoke to Rock Paper Shotgun about the delay of Prison Architect 2, as well as the cancellation of Life By You, and reception of Cities: Skylines 2. Talking about the former, Lilja says there were "quality issues" – notably "not the same kind of bucket of challenges that we had with Life By You" – which ultimately led to it being pushed back "to give the players the game they deserve" when it launches.
It's more than that, though, as Lilja continues: "It's also based on the fact that we, in all transparency, see that fans right now, with a squeezed budget for games, have higher expectations, and are less accepting that you will fix things over time. That's our take. The gaming space has always been the winner-takes-all type of environment. A few games bring in most of the players, and most games are dropped quite quickly, and this is even more pronounced now, [during] maybe the last two years."
Lilja goes on to say that when it came to Cities: Skylines 2 – which launched last year to major performance issues, and thanks to multiple delays still hasn't released on consoles – Paradox "knew we would have some issues, like in every release." He later admits that some of those things were "issues that we had not really understood fully, and that's totally on us." When it comes to the city-builder's performance, Paradox chief creative officer Henrik Fåhraeus says in a separate conversation that "we underestimated how it will be perceived by players."
Slightly more optimistically, Fåhraeus says Paradox learned from Cities: Skylines 2 that "if we could have brought players in to try it on a larger scale, that would have helped," and that going forward, the publisher wants to have a "larger degree" of openness with players, "and quite early if possible." With that in mind, hopefully the publisher might be able to avoid the same pitfalls in the future.