Paradox Development Studio, the internal developer at Paradox Interactive responsible for many of the company’s grand strategy hits, has “split into three distinct studios.” The change happened earlier this year and was announced yesterday in a post on the Paradox forum.
Each of the three studios is committed to a particular Paradox series, but notably Imperator: Rome isn’t among them. Also notable: one of them is making a new game which will be announced next month.
The post explains that the three studios are referred to internally as PDS Green, PDS Red and PDS Gold. Each studio is dedicated to maintaining existing games and to developing new ones, with one new game to be announced at PDXCON, the company’s fan event, next month.
PDS Green is responsible for the development of Stellaris (with support from Paradox Actic), PDS Red is in charge of Crusader Kings 3 (while working with Paradox Thalassic), and PDS Gold is in charge of Hearts Of Iron IV.
“You might have noticed that Imperator: Rome isn’t assigned to any of the studios mentioned above,” writes product manager Bevan Davies in the post. “We realized that there was a need to bring reinforcement for a couple of the projects at PDS, and given where Imperator was at in the run up to 2.0’s launch, we decided that after the launch of the update we would move people from Imperator to these other projects.”
The post says that they plan to regrow the team and continue work on Imperator, “but for the short term we needed to focus our efforts on these other projects.”
Nate enjoyed his (and Ghoastus, the Roman ghost’s) time with the Imperator: Rome review, although the 2.0 patch referenced above was a major rework of many of the game’s systems.
If you’re wondering why Europa Universalis IV was also not mentioned in the post, that’s because ongoing development was already moved to new studio Paradox Tinto last year. That change hasn’t gone well so far. The studio released their first EUIV DLC earlier this week, called Leviathan, and it quickly became the worst rated release on Steam.
Recent woes aside, I’m always excited for a new strategy game from Paradox. What are you hoping they’re making, and honestly, why is it Victoria 3?