Mattias Lilja: Last News

Cities: Skylines 2 has apologised to players for a “rushed” expansion pack and delayed the console release of the city builder game.Cities: Skylines 2 was released at the end of last year, with players immediately experiencing technical difficulties. A number of hotfixes were released to try and fix a number of bugs and the beach properties expansion pack was delayed to 2024.

Life By You, its The Sims competitor, had been cancelled, and following that news, the internal devlopment team, Paradox Tectonic, has been shuttered.The news of the game’s cancellation came as a shock to many. It had been delayed several times, including an indefinite delay anounced back in May, but outright cancelling a project that seemed to be so close to the finish line is drastic.In a statement delivered via the company’s Paradox Forum, deputy CEO Mattias Lilja wrote that the decision to cancel the game was made due to “a clear failure on Paradox’s part to meet both our own and the community’s expectations.” The game was ambitious and promised a fully simulated town with no loading screens.The game was due to launch in early access, sopmething that gives developers time to iron out kinks, take more time to create feaatures, and get lots of free community testing and feedback.

Paradox Interactive has released an external report into its own work culture following issues of harassment that were raised last year in a staff survey.As reported by Eurogamer, the report was compiled by Gender Balance – a Swedish firm that specialises in discrimination, harassment and equality issues – and its results confirm that there are cultural issues within Paradox that foster misconduct.“We believe that complete transparency is the best way to move forward and address the issues and behaviours that have been identified,” Paradox chief of staff Mattias Lilja said in response to the report and the recommendations from Gender Balance.In a separate interview with Direkt, which was provided to Eurogamer with the English translation, Lilja said: “We are now getting to the bottom of this and we are getting a concrete picture of the problem.”“The report is a first step for us to really address these issues and bridge the trust gap that exists. Everyone should feel safe at Paradox and thrive, that is our responsibility to ensure.”Lilja continues to address the report, saying that Gender Balance expected more severe cases and found fewer but discovered behaviour of “inappropriate/nasty jargon” that “affects women to a greater degree than men, which is completely unacceptable.