Players are now less "accepting" that games will be fixed, say Paradox, after "underestimating" the reaction to Cities: Skylines 2's performance woes

rockpapershotgun.com:

Paradox Interactive delayed jail management simulator Prison Architect 2 indefinitely this August, commenting at the time that the game had notable performance issues, and that its system-led design was proving tricky to tinker with. This came a couple of months after the Crusader Kings publisher washed their hands of the sequel's original developers, Double Eleven.

Speaking to me at Paradox's Media Day last week, deputy chief executive officer Mattias Lilja offered a shade more insight on the decision, suggesting that hard-up players have "higher expectations" at present and are less trusting that developers will fix problems. Chief creative officer Henrik Fåhraeus also offered thoughts on what Paradox have learned from the disastrous launch of Cities: Skylines 2 in late 2023. Specifically, he said they need to give actual players access to the game early on, not just testers.

"We're pretty confident that the gameplay is good," Lilja said of Prison Architect 2. "But we had quality issues, which means to give the players the game they deserve, we decided to delay it. So it's not the same kind of bucket of challenges that we had with Life By You, which led to cancellation. It's more that we haven't been able to keep the pace that we wanted. But when we do peer reviews of the game and user testing and whatnot, people give us feedback, we actually get pretty good feedback, except for certain issues that we need to fix. Some of them are harder to fix than we thought."

Which issues, specifically, are Prison Architect 2's new developers Kokku having trouble with, I asked? "It's mostly certain technical issues rather than design," Lilja went on. "It's more how can we make this technically high-quality enough for a stable release." But there's also a degree of wider calculation, he added, based on Paradox's sense of how tolerant players currently are of imperfections even in early access releases.

"It's also based on the fact that we, in all transparency, see that fans