Communication Nation

I used to say I have a great job; working at Paradox with a dedicated team and a growing business would be a great job for anyone remotely interested in games. But, like most jobs, there is a downside to all the glitz and glamour (?) of the gaming business. That may come as a shock to all of you who’ve always equated Paradox with glitz and glamour.

Let's say that you release a game that is considered buggy on release; say, some fictional game we’ll make up now for the sake of illustration… let’s call it Hearts of Iron 3. Upon release, you will have to endure quite a lot of heat from the gamers, and rightfully so. Apart from the occasional death threats (very rare, but they do exist) you get to learn a lot of new (strong!) words that will improve your language skills. After all, English is the second language of most our employees, so this sort of flavorful vocabulary-expanding exercise may seem quite valuable.

Here’s where the ability to communicate with us is quite important. In this case (HoI3) I offered to pay money back to the people who felt the product didn't meet their expectations and got a few requests from people who wanted their money back. One of the emails I sent to Steam, asking them for a refund for an unhappy customer, got a reply saying, "This customer has played HoI3 for 28 hours; how unhappy can he be?" I guess it sometimes takes a while to figure out our games suck :)

Normally though, communicating directly with gamers is great. That's the reason I keep my email open (fredrik.wester@paradoxplaza.com), and as long as your email isn't just a long rant or outright abuse, I will do my best to reply within 24 hours.

The best place to communicate directly with us has always been our user forums, where we are also trying to get our external developers to participate in the online discussions. Not only do we reply to questions and keep an open dialog with people who play our games, but one well-kept secret is how we actually designed Hearts of Iron 2: Doomsday using a lot of user feedback. Those of you who have been with us since 2006 know this already, since we openly asked the questions like, "what features would you like to see in a Hearts of Iron 2 expansion?" and then took the best ideas and implemented them. It would be hard to find any other industry where you can get so much help from your customers.

Through the forums we have also found mod teams that are now helping us create new games (like Magna Mundi, For the Glory and Arsenal of Democracy). The passion and talent within our community is remarkable, and we love cooperating even more closely with our fans.

So the question is, how can we do this better going forward? Maybe opening up our yearly convention to all gamers or, like I mentioned earlier, inviting gamers to invest in different projects? Maybe we should discuss it over a beer?

Looking forward to a great 2011, starting with Magicka, releasing this week.

Fred

If you want to comment on this blog post, pls go to this forum thread.

Playing some Majesty 2: Monster Kingdom this week, and of course the Magicka Beta. I'll write more about Magicka next time.