YMMV / Paradox Interactive

• Fan Speak: Paradox games have required the invention of a new term, "border gore", to describe the AI's tendency to create countries with shredded, broken and disjointed borders.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Paradox Interactive got hit HARD by this when they announced price hikes for their games just before the Steam Summer Sale of 2017. The uproar was so great that eventually, CEO Fredrik Wester came out to confirm that the price hikes will be reverted after the Summer Sale is over. One probable reason for the firestorm was that PI's recent games are heavy on DLC, making them expensive without the price hikes.
  • Outside of people familiar with the games they make Paradox is essentially known as "that map game company who release 50 DLCs for each game".
  • Another controversy erupted in May 2021, when Leviathan, a DLC for Europa Universalis IV, received user reviews of a abysmal 7%, becoming the worst-reviewed product on Steam. Even studio manager and game director Johan Andersson later admitted in a statement that PDS had dropped the ball as early as Golden Century, an earlier DLC. That was not all; while re-deploying staff to fix EU IV, development for Imperator: Rome was stopped for at least the rest of 2021.
  • Paradox's lack of respect for Quality Assurance staff, which including firing the entire QA department in the publishing section without telling the rest of the company, underpaying QA staff that remained in the development teams and keeping them under-resourced compared to the massive marketing department means that every single game and DLC the Paradox development studio puts out is in effect only tested for hard crash bugs, and absolutely no work is put into game balance or to ensure features from earlier DLC work with new features. They rely on the community to fill in the gaps after each release breaks features or doesn't work properly. Every year or two the company will release a massively broken game or DLC that creates a new firestorm of controversy. Even games they are only publishing suffer because when Paradox doesn't care about QA, that lack of concern and the "ship now, fix later" mentality bleeds into developers by the way of release deadlines and budget restrictions.
• Vindicated by History: Paradox Interactive games tend to fall into a cycle. A game releases and gets dozens of expansions & DLC. Then a sequel releases with loads of bugs and glitches and fewer features than a game with hundreds of dollars worth of DLC & Expansions. Fans think the new game is a downgrade because of it. Then come a few performance fixes, mods, and expansions/DLC. Fans take a look at the game and think that even the base game wasn't as bad as they said it was. Repeat for every game.

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