Many games are currently being released in a less than perfect state and are being patched gradually. The recent release Cities: Skylines 2 from Paradox is a good example of this. Speaking on this topic, Matthias Lilja, CEO of Paradox, argues that players are currently less willing to accept games being packaged after launch.
This is also based on the fact that, in our transparency, we see that fans have higher expectations now, with limited playing budgets, and are less willing to wait for you to fix things over time. This is our opinion. The gaming space has always been a winner’s environment. Some games attract the most players, and most games get shipped very quickly, and this is even more evident now, [в течение] maybe the last few years.
People should have high expectations. Just to be on the safe side, we need to make sure to double check everything. Some of the problems I would say we had in Cities 2 were problems that we didn’t fully understand, and that’s entirely on us.
Talking about the launch issues for Cities: Skylines 2, the CEO says that they were aware of the optimization issues, but in the end they underestimated how bad the player response would be.
We knew the performance wasn’t great, but we didn’t underestimate how players would perceive it – how bad player perception would be. So I think one of the lessons from Cities 2 is that if we could get players to experience the game on a bigger scale, that would help. In the future, we need to establish this communication with players, and if possible do it as early as possible.
