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sirchick said:
Will you guys look into making other tycoon type games besides Cities in Motion?

Rollercoaster tycoon was epic in its day. I've always wanted a new one but the franchise had legal issues and pretty much killed it. (FYI: that franchise is for sale so go buy it and make an awesome one using the CIM2 engine :) )
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We'd love to. It's something we've been talking about for years - it's just a question of time.

Have any cool ideas?

Roller coaster would be awesome - but they wanted $3.5M for it - which frankly is ridiculous.

/shams
 
RedRalphWiggum said:
Shams, would there be a market for an architecture simulator? I'm thinking something with better graphics and physics than Minecraft, with no terraforming...
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A modern day version of SimTower, perhaps?

I wonder how that could be done in 3D, while still maintaining a great overview. My solution would be allowing people to built their tower in 3D. That is building each floor in 3D, but allowing the player to view their tower in 2D, which will warn them if there are issues on certain floors.

Actually, a SimTower in 3D with far more options than the old game would be great. Of course, you ought to maintain the unrealistic aspect of being able to add floors to an existing building to ensure it remains fun. Alternatively, you are given an empty building. Or a combination of the two.
 
Shams said:
We'd love to. It's something we've been talking about for years - it's just a question of time.

Have any cool ideas?

Roller coaster would be awesome - but they wanted $3.5M for it - which frankly is ridiculous.

/shams
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Something like Transport Giant (couldn't find a better link, sorry) perhaps?

It's a game where you manage a transport firm from 1850 to 2050. The original was released back in 2004 by JoWood (which probably means Nordic games got the rights).
It was an amazing game, I must have played over two thousand hours during the last decade or so and i still play loads of it.

Now i'm no expert in the making of games but a game like this could probably be based on the CiM engine. That would give you a load of models that you could simply add into the game and hopefully save some time (and money).

Do it and i will throw money at you until my wallet is empty!
 
I'd love to see Victoria 3, a real proper city builder, a trading game would be nice, Victoria 3, an architecture sim would be cool or a city builder kind of idea but set in like 500BC Gaul, where you had a migrating tribe and you just had to go through a map, set up a village start life and trade, just create a self sustaining village/town in a setting I can't think of being done before. Oh, Victoria 3. I really love city builders. I'd just love the idea of setting up a small village, but no terraforming or anything, a game that makes you have to adapt to the environment and terrain, randomly generated maps or a huge selection with their own different situations that require the player to have to adapt, have to make it work in the conditions, not one where you just set up anywhere and terraform it to perfection so it is just the same as everywhere else.
 
Shams said:
We'd love to. It's something we've been talking about for years - it's just a question of time.

Have any cool ideas?

Roller coaster would be awesome - but they wanted $3.5M for it - which frankly is ridiculous.

/shams
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Chariots of War II with city building included. ;)

Assume the role of an ancient despot, build cities, armies and conquer known world!
 
Lots of great ideas.

I like Le Vengur's the best so far :)

Ralph: I dunno - sounds very, very niche - minecraft is a little bit of everything - that's why it works.
 
Shams said:
Lots of great ideas.

I like Le Vengur's the best so far :)
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I too am a sucker for Transport Giant. A shame the game itself was so buggy.
 
Thanks!

There was a re-release of the original in 2012 by UIG Entertainment that is on Gamersgate that comes with the patches. It's very stable compared to the gold release (no new content though).

The original could be modded but it was quite hard, if a new version would have something like steam workshop that would just be epic!
Also here is some gameplay
 
City builders (or something similar) is really something i'd love to see you do, I think you could put a really interesting and in depth slant on the genre, i'd love it. What do you think? Would you be interested in the genre?
 
Might be a bit odd to ask this, but what sort of budget does the average game have?

And maybe an 'easier' question, more money poured into a project means what exactly? Better graphics design, more options, greater size of game, faster to produce etc? (which would mean the people who buy it must have better machines to play at optimum level) Or does it work in a different way?

And third, where do the ideas for new games come from and how many great ideas have been rejected so far due to the complexity of translating it into a (financially) viable product?
 
diegosimeone said:
Might be a bit odd to ask this, but what sort of budget does the average game have?

And maybe an 'easier' question, more money poured into a project means what exactly? Better graphics design, more options, greater size of game, faster to produce etc? (which would mean the people who buy it must have better machines to play at optimum level) Or does it work in a different way?

And third, where do the ideas for new games come from and how many great ideas have been rejected so far due to the complexity of translating it into a (financially) viable product?
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Excellent questions!

1: Budgets - it varies greatly of course. The vast majority of "developer spend" goes towards salaries right? so it's highly dependent on what kind of devs we're talking about, size of the team, length of project and where the devs are from.

Teleglitch for instance was made by a team man team from Estonia - while Magicka: Wizard Wars is made in-house by a 13 man team. The largest project we finance sport around 30 man strong dev teams.

So the answer is - very small - to semi-big. But it's nothing compared to AAA budgets. The marketing budget for Battlefield 4 or say GTA 5 could finance all development at Paradox for the next DECADE.

2: More money poured into a project usually means it actually gets finished. Most projects are behind schedule/budget. But in the other cases more money means the game either gets more features or more polish. Seldomly does more money = faster production - as the limiting factor is available developers. Again Battlefield is a good example - being what it is they can, and do, pour tons of money on contractors who help make sure the game gets finished in time. But it's way trickier for us with our highly specialized games and technologies. There aren't tons of clausewitz devs moping about exactly.

3: Ideas come from three different places primarily

A: Internal studios - PDS comes up with a great idea for a game - say they call it Project Nero. They pitch it and discuss it with the rest of us and boom we're off on a grand adventure with a new IP

B: We (myself and other creative people at Paradox) come up with a cool idea, write a concept and show it around until we find just the right developer who we think could make a kick-ass game - War of the Roses or War of the Vikings are great exampels.

C:Third - and perhaps most common - a developer comes to us with a kickass idea and asks us to publish it or finance it so they can build the game with our help.


I receive, review and evaluate somewhere around 10-30 game concept on average each week. 80% are dismissed almost immediately for a number of reasons (not being "paradoxy" enough, not being financially viable, not suiting our needs, not suiting our expertise or just bad timing). The remaining 20% get a deeper evaluation and if they are up to spec we do an even deeper evaluation - very few make it past that stage. Each year we sign maybe 5-8 new games.

So yeah - a lot of great and fantastic ideas get rejected for numerous reasons.

Great questions.

Keep em coming.

/shams
 
Thanks for the thorough answer, didn't expect it haha :D

Shams said:
I receive, review and evaluate somewhere around 10-30 game concept on average each week. 80% are dismissed almost immediately for a number of reasons (not being "paradoxy" enough, not being financially viable, not suiting our needs, not suiting our expertise or just bad timing). The remaining 20% get a deeper evaluation and if they are up to spec we do an even deeper evaluation - very few make it past that stage. Each year we sign maybe 5-8 new games.

So yeah - a lot of great and fantastic ideas get rejected for numerous reasons.
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As for this. That's like 1000 game ideas a year (approx. 20x52), which might include some ideas that are pretty much the same concept so let's make that 600-700 yet only 5-8 make it. As some ideas are halted due to bad timing or financial reasons, I assume that at some point some of them may come back to you guys when the time is right or when you feel that you can now finance it and get a great return.
Has this ever occured? Say, idea comes in 2009, rejected in 2009 and 2010, then you remember it in 2014 and say this can be a good idea for 2016 or 2017 or something along these lines. Would be interesting to see if there's a game out there that has gone through this process :)
 
RedRalphWiggum said:
Who decides the budget allocation for prospective titles?

Has PDS ever pitched a game idea that publishing/PDX shot down?
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The budget depends on what the pitch is trying to achieve, besides it's not like a DVD comes to us with an idea and asks "so how much do you wanna give us?" Usually the devs have a clear idea of costs and that let's us estimate if it'll be good business or not. We wrangle back and forth before we settle for a budget - " how more/less of a game do we get for +/-25% budget".

You can always spend more - the trick is finding a sweet spot letting us manage risk and make money for us and the developer.


The process hasn't been so formalized - but considering how good ideas PDS have it's never been and issue. Again the trick is finding a project where we (publishing) can help PDS make the game even better. Project Nero is an example of this.

/s
 
diegosimeone said:
Thanks for the thorough answer, didn't expect it haha :D



As for this. That's like 1000 game ideas a year (approx. 20x52), which might include some ideas that are pretty much the same concept so let's make that 600-700 yet only 5-8 make it. As some ideas are halted due to bad timing or financial reasons, I assume that at some point some of them may come back to you guys when the time is right or when you feel that you can now finance it and get a great return.
Has this ever occured? Say, idea comes in 2009, rejected in 2009 and 2010, then you remember it in 2014 and say this can be a good idea for 2016 or 2017 or something along these lines. Would be interesting to see if there's a game out there that has gone through this process :)
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Sometimes old ideas do get revisited - but none that actually eventually saw the light of day. But "timing" can mean - "we just signed a very similar game" or "we have enough Viking games right now."

//s
 
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