The Prison Architect 2 Developer Has Been Removed... 3 Months Before Release 

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How on earth do they go from Stellaris' success to shooting themselves in the foot over and over and over?

2:55 Isn't it insane how Prison Architect gets to be described as "one of those games in the Rimworld tradition" when it was a major inspiration for the Rimworld dev?

Paradox are following in the the footsteps of titans. EA, ABK, Enron.

Paradox was one of my favourite publishers years ago. Now I put them on par with EA, and Ubisoft. They really went downhill when they went public. Short term profits over long term growth; the death knell of many of companies.

Prison Architect 2 was doomed from the start, even before it's announcement I did knew this, because the OG Devs Introversion Software did sell the IP and are making their new game The Last Starship. Without them PA2 will nothing be like PA1

I've worked on a couple of games where there was significant tension between publishers and devs and behind the scenes it was obvious the publisher wanted to cut off the relationship as soon as contractually possible i.e: Certification passed and Day1 patch is ready. The opposite can also happen, where devs are working on a project they don't want and/or dislike the directions forced on them, and they can't wait to bail out. As you might expect, the games in question are usually not very good because this tension and lack of passion can blatantly be felt in the product.

This really is bizarre. Sure, the dev's departure might be because of the contract ending, but it is not exactly common to have them be shown the door before the game is released, at least. I don't see this being a good move.

It's sort of amazing how...traumatic... Prison Architect's journey has been under Paradox when you consider that the original was put together by an absolutely tiny studio whose relationship with solvency was always rather tenuous(though their output is something special). The original actively regressed technically and ran into further balance issues with the DLCs; and the sequel has been stuck in development, and not 100% encouraging development, for absolute ages.

remember Totalbiscuit, wait for reviews, don't preorder

Just wait until the news about their Life By You project becomes a little more public lol

Paradox has turned into a second rate Electronic Arts. I'll observe what happens with their games because I enjoy watching a good dumpster fire, but they firmly landed on my no-buy list after the disastrous launch of Cities: Skylines 2. Fortunately, I know better than to pre-order games, so I didn't waste my money on it. I have Prison Architect, but I haven't spent a huge amount of time with it. It is a fun concept. I also have Surviving Mars and Cities: Skylines. They are good games, but the DLC spam got to be a bit much. Also, the final update and DLC for Surviving Mars didn't launch well and broke some things. I see no hope for Paradox. The company is too far gone to be salvaged at this point.

Yes, it's crazy. I've been a Paradox Fan since Hearts of Iron 3 (HOI3). But for that last year or two it seems like Paradox is in the News every few months for something bad. Also, Paradox has had the worst reviewed product on Steam at least 3 times now. They always come out saying how they're going to change because of said lowest rated items on Steam... but never do... also, their DLC's and DLC system is starting to crack... DLC is getting more expensive, yet the quality has gone down.

Worth noting regarding Introversion's The Last Starship ("the FTL like game"). While Scanner Sombre was fully released, The Last Starship is in very early access, likely years from release. I have no idea what they were thinking with Scanner Sombre. It was a cool little two hour tech demo in my estimation, not a full game. I own The Last Starship, as I do every Introversion game ever released, and I'm not overly optimistic. At this point it's shaping up to be a very basic game without any real novelty to it. But, time will tell.

Have you heard about the Life By You devs drastically raising the minimum and recommended specs (to 32GB of RAM!) less than a month before the early access release? Do you remember how Colossal Order did the same exact thing with Cities Skylines 2, just shortly before release? Coming down with a case of the Paradox....

The DLC policy of Paradox, and other similar policies, makes sequels _really_ hard to sell. Because they introduce such a huge content parity, it's really not worth buying a sequel until years after its been complete and there's a dozen DLC released for it. I think they need to do for sequels is focus on improving the player experience of the core loop. Things like UI improvements, more intuitive gameplay, more control over details (especially true with C:S2), and a cleaner core framework for more content to be added to with updates/DLCs. DLCs also can't be repeats of DLC from the first game. Deja vu isn't a pleasant feeling when dropping $10-$20 on new content, so you need to separate it somehow. Players will be comparing sequel DLC to the DLC from the original, so make it obvious that there's tangible difference in the new stuff. Make it feel like progress has been made.

I am going to say something that may be controversial among some folks but is pretty much a no-brainer for me and the folks I know that buy computer games : Are the technical specs between the version 1 and 2 of the games drastically different? There are a LOT of folks out here who don't upgrade/replace their hardware as fast as the gaming Industry thinks it should do. Many of us are not on the 3 year cycle in regards to processor speed, graphics card etc. that game companies operate under and think that things should be moving at. Many of us run a computer literally into the ground before replacing it... and won't necessarily be able to run niftier graphics intended for ever faster machines. Some buy on a 5 year cycle due to the fact that their computer is NOT just for gaming, and business depreciations are still mostly operating at a 5 year cycle in many countries. Others just don't have the cash flow to do this sort of thing... running computers as much as a decade out from their release date as its what we can get, especially because of the huge price hikes etc that the pandemic created that have not come down to traditional levels. In my experience (going back some 40 years) personal computers in general run in the range of $2k for the average person (in US Dollars), Nearly every computer I have bought (not counting peripherals like monitors) had had that as a base cost if it could run what were the games of its era.

After the last few years, Paradox going full EA is not surprising in the slightest.

I played Prison Architect 1 for 800 hours according to Steam... I didn't even know that Prison Architect 2 was being made

Only thing Harebrained Schemes needed was more shadowrun and battletech. Only thing Prison Architect 2 needed was a better game engine that can handle Z levels.

Introversion Software also did darwinia, DEFCON, and more importantly, Uplink. I dont think they have ever been -great- at handling their financials though, kind of like Arcen Games, so I wasnt surprised to see Prison Architect go somewhere else eventually but what Paradox's publishing side has been doing lately is rather stupid and shortsighted. I do wonder how well they can possibly do in the future, especially as I suspect they'll be getting more competition in the Grand Strategy genre in the future.

Just another week at Paradox Publishing ^^

Paradox inflates their DLC prices on older titles to push their subscription service. It make it very hard for a patient gamer who views the stoppage of DLC as the completion of a title and a time to buy game on sale.

Theres an editing error at 5:06, Bellular says "one of their more recent games that they've done after that which is" then goes on to explain the idea of the game (a combo of ftl and factorio) but never actually says the name of the game. Seems the title of the game has been cut but nothing else. If anyone reads this and can upvote for visibility it'd be much appreciated.

I don't think this is weird... the original contract ended early 2024 and they didn't have any provisions to go beyond that. The other team was already set to take over so they all just decided that the game was complete enough for them to do that and add some polish before the new official release date. I'm guessing that Paradox didn't want to have 2 teams engaged on the same game since they had provisions set for the new studio to take over. Maybe not a common situation, but I'm not sure it suggests there's significant trouble.

Hey Bellular, can you cover Pistol Shrimp's recent kickstarter of Free Stars, a proper sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters, which was originally known as Star Control II? It's a pretty darn cool story and it will be interesting to see how things go from here!

I was looking forward to PA2 as a big fan of PA1, the artstyle looked good and still somewhat in keeping with the original. Multi-level buildings would be a massive expansion to the building simulation as well. Sad to see D11 leave development after so many of their staff in middlesborough work on it for such a long time.

I really hope EU5 isnt shit. Ive put so many hours into EU4 and CK2, but was let down by Imperator and CK3

Why do they ever want to make this game in 3D ? They removed the core of what prison architect is/was.

Having a trailer that looks like more work was put in than the actual game already made me wary, yet I wishlisted it. I guess I'm not the only one now probably not bothering with the game anymore.

on a random tangent, Michael, are you guys thinking of a sequel to pale beyond ... or a new game? totally up for more from the studio, played the shit out of pale beyond and love to see games coming from my country, N Ireland

I was looking forward to prison architect 2 now im scared

I don’t usually buy their games until I see how much it and all the DLC costs. I’m also looking at other gamer’s feedback on said game, looking for things that others are repeating.

Paradox when from studio I would buy all games blind to studio I don't buy anything from any more. It's like watching your childhood friend wreck his life

At 7:14 you said it's coming out in December but the title says 3 months before release?

I wouldn’t say that the UK team are necessarily more expensive. This isn’t a straight 1:1 swap. Remember, the UK government offers heavy incentives for certain industries if they work in the UK; see film making, for the most common examples, also car manufacturing. Well, gaming companies such as Creative Assembly and Rockstar have taken advantage of these subsidies, tax breaks, etc. I honestly don’t know whether Brazil offers the same, but am just am just saying there are others areas to look into surrounding this other than financial. After all, accepting that UK gift horse does mean that such companies have to follow certain guidelines; as with Black Rock and Vanguard, so with any government intervention. It is a weird situation. Most companies I have worked with in the software industry would have worked their product up to release; made sure there was an initial period of support to ensure any adoption or teething issues were covered and would then consider a contract complete. Mind you, with more and more studios being acquired and going public, they become answerable to a board of financiers rather than the customer. This is always where companies begin to fail as they lose any ethics regarding customer satisfaction and quality, but become subject to meeting board requirements and returns on investment. If I recall correctly, didn’t Activision/Blizzard in their most successful year ever let go of a lot of staff simply to increase their profit margins by some percentage points. That they then tried to hire back a lot of this talent afterwards, just made the decision all the more ridiculous. Gaming is a huge financial market now and being successful in that market can be elusive. If you want to work in it, as I’d say with any other job, do it because you love the work you do. The amount of churn with professionals leaving gaming to go to other jobs is very high. The gamers that remain in the industry out of passion is quite small, and those that do remain are tied to the suits who moved in when they suddenly realised the profits to be made. Just my random thoughts.

Prison Architect isn't Rimworld-like.. Actually Rimworld got inspired by Prison Architect ;)

Backed the first game directly as I've always enjoyed introversion titles dating back to putting a cheque into the post to buy a copy of Uplink after playing a coverdisc demo. Still got some of the early pre-steam versions saved on an old PC. Interest waned once the game was bought over and the DLC's started coming along and the visuals of PA2 just don't grab me the way PA's did. Almost comes across as a generic tappstore game Scanner Sombre is a decent "walking experience" kind of game although the LIDAR visual style isn't going to be for everyone

I wonder what is need to be done to successfully transfer project of such scale from one studio to another...

I was fans of a lot of these series' before Paradox bought them. Prison Architect and Cities Skylines in particular. Really sucks when something you've already paid for is now being patched to support 1 million DLCs with no regard for the underlying balance of the thing you originally paid for. Then they put new developers on the case to run the franchise into the ground. I really hate that company. Even though they own some of my favorite series, like Stellaris and Crusader Kings.

DEFCON and Darwinia were awesome games too. Hope Introversion throw out another hit. I think they have it in them, for sure.

The piece of information that I was missing is that I'd thought Paradox had bought Introversion, and that Introversion had been working on Prison Architect 2. So the situation isn't as bad as I thought it was. The fact that Life By You has been delayed indefinitely might be a sign that Paradox has learned their lesson about releasing on a schedule instead of ehen the game is ready, although it's a bad sign for the state kf that game.

5:08 Yeah. I have that one on my wish list, The Last StarShip. I thought it looked interesting. But haven’t gotten around to buying it yet. But I intend to eventually. I should go find a let’s play on it.

what do you think of the IGN rumors going around about Total War Star Wars?

Aww man I’m seriously bummed out knowing now I can’t finally make a prison with more than one story to it

Past certification on all platforms in January 2024 but not releasing until December 2024? That is strange if the game is already finished. I'd be skepitical of what exactly Kukko are adding to the game if the game is already done.

It’s so weird that I love this channel so much. I’m not really a “gamer,” I do play video games but I mostly just play a few cute, cozy games like Stardew Valley. Right now I’ve been obsessed with Breath of the Wild even tho it came out years ago now. News like this shouldn’t really interest me, but I always find myself tuning in anyway because I like the way you explain it

It's the toxic corporate mentality imo, seems to me, Paradox upper management treatment towards their developers is as a "replaceable resources". Which is bad bc the soul & love from original creator simply isn't there. The quality will be just different. It could be good, but certainly not better.

PA2's art style reminds me of the corporate 3D style that Kroger uses for all their advertisements.

Paradox has lost its mind in the last year or so. Its been frustrating because they're in my top 3 fav dev/publishers. I don't have much faith in Life by You at this point either.

Paradox used to be the GOAT developer for me, releasing a banger after banger after banger (EU3, CK2, HoI3, Eu4, Hoi4, CK3) and now for laste few years they are stumbling from disaster to flop and back to disaster again. Makes me so sad.

im a huge fan of colony sims, building games and space games. pretty much every trait that the last starship has. and i heard absolutely NOTHING about it other than like one post by the devs. the main issues regarding sales for that game is that it is very much early access (like beta 1.00001 levels of early access) and marketing (which if they are busy making it playable long term is understandable)

Risk of Rain 2 moved from 2D to 3D and was fantastic, so there’s definitely a way to do it right

The gameplay for RT3 is actually good. The issues with RT3 is that it was buggy, had some head-scratcher design decisions, and wasn't optimized well enough. Just like Sim City 3000 it ran slugishly. They eventually did fix that, but they haven't really fixed any of the bad design, like non-scaling ui that makes you break out a magnifying glass if you're resolution is above 1080p.

Played the game pretty extensively back then and also was pretty active in it's community. Never once did I hear someone saying "yeah this needs 3D graphics"

I hope theses dudes chill. They own my favorite ttrpg series now.

I am waiting for Prison Architect 2 to be available for a couple of month before I decide if I want to buy it because all of the DLCs for Prison Architect 1 had bugs galore. Also right now Prison Architect 2 looks like a copy of Prison Architect 1 in 3D.

You know, looking back, it feels like there was something (or someone) weird happening between Paradox Publishing and Paradox Entertainment. Almost all of the issues seem to be with the games not developed inhouse. You really have to wonder if some overly enthusiastic manager over-promised and embellished some truths to his bosses at Paradox proper and now we are seeing the results

From what I've seen of Paradox, under their previous Leadership they were very, very liberal with expanding the direction of their games into an area that they weren't really well familiar with. The investment required for some of the engines and other things that these companies need to make their games work is very expensive as compared to old titles (CK2 vs CK3 as a good example), you've got games like the new Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2, which have basically squandered their initial hype due to the very poor performance of the previous team. Let's basically list off the recent financial disasters: Millennia Foundry Star Trek Infinite The Lamplighters League Games that have underperformed in a key aspect: Cities Skylines 2 They have tossed a TON of money into the above, and aside from Cities, they are all failures. They will likely only break even, at best. Age of Wonders 4 was apparently a very large surprise for Paradox, it recovered its entire budget in the first week, over 80% of the sales were for the Deluxe Edition, which is the Season Pass. Every DLC release so far (the final one of the season pass is coming out next month) has been very well received. They have announced that there will be additional DLC forthcoming for AoW 4, no numbers on how many or how large they'll be. If I had to guess, it is hard to get a game greenlit by Paradox, or was in the past, and when using unfamiliar technology they tried to give overly ambitious timelines that they could hit, and vastly underestimated the amount of work and time it would take to get it all done. This isn't just them, it is all of the various studios that have been involved, i.e. Lamplighters League as a prime example.

Well... I am enjoying "The Foundry" that they recently released... that's a good thing they did I guess..

I like stellaris But god damn do they change the entire way of how the game works often and GOD DAMN do the cost of the DLCs add up 💀

11:05 I miss heard you, you said hadn't.

It's an acid test ... When things are going well, it's easy to do the seemingly right thing. It's what happens when money runs low when good and bad management both show their true colours.

😪 Thankfully they released and not shutdown like wangotango or arkane

The last star shipship isn’t released yet. It’s in early access.

I had pre ordered PA2. I stood by my choice after the first delay but asked for a refund when they delayed again until September. With CS2 and KSP2 fiasco I don’t want to risk it now. I’ll buy again after the reviews are in if positive

The hell is happening with AAA gaming industry ?

Did Valve's move to overwrite CSGO with CS2? Because right now I don't think everyone would agree with that, they have lost quite a few players to other games and the competitive side is just non existent due to the amount of hacking.

I think what happened was: They said they would deliver the game in day X, if you pay us Y But now the game got delayed so they wanted more than Y, and Paradox didn't want to invest much more so they just moved the responsibility to a cheaper studio. That's actually not that weird to think about.

PA2, in my view, is the sequel that literally nobody asked for. the first game is so good, and by far one of my favorites prior to Paradox acquisition and subsequent DLCs. i've been watching the dev diary videos for PA2, and haven't been sold on what i see. the entire project feels like a giant cash-grab to me so i will wait and see what the reviews say before buying - my faith in Paradox is pretty much shot at this point.

I don't agree with what paradox has done with games like cities 2 etc but, listing to the video and reading its headline, if at 8:00 in the video Double Eleven say the plan was to hand over the project then they were not "removed", they just finished their contracted work.....

here have a hapy and witty remark

Make me want to play prison architect, back to the past

The problem with paradox DLC policy is that it's perfectly manageable if you play the game from the very start and buy the DLC as they release. However, it's a huge porblem for a new player who wants to buy the game 7 years after the game's release and has to wade through 30+ DLC's or has to buy them in the entire pack which means paying €/$100+

PDX is probably huffing glue.....again

VTM: Bloodlines 2 is going to have good company soon. Also, unfair to say that The Last Starship has not sold well. It's in Alpha version 9 at the moment, and it has overly positive reviews. It's understandable that people are not flocking to an early alpha in this day and age.

Prison Architect 2 has the same art style as Two Point Hospital. The similarities are striking

well, the thing that makes PA2 interesting for me is the addition of verticality in your building options.... thats it. But that they have booted the main developers.... thats kinda sus, also Paradox just pumping out DLC after DLC without addressing core game issues is hard to get past when it comes to buying one of their products...

Scanner Somber is interesting. It's more of an interactive story. I enjoyed the shocking end revelation. 😎 But I can understand why it didn't "perform well". 🙄

I hated warcraft 3's 3d style vs the 2d art from previous games. It's probably one reason I didn't get into wow. Making cities 2 high fidelity and cutting out the players without high end machines was a stupid call.

KSP 2, then CS 2 and now PA 2? This is not a coincidence. STACY, VERONICA AND CHAD ARE MAKING THEIR MOVE AGAINST US! Gamers! Rise! No more Mr. Nice Guy!

PA's dev is a sweet guy and I was wondering if they would let him finish his game. You expect a living wage in the UK? Def not a Tory. Honestly way things are right now Id think they would cost more in Braz - the UK has savaged its jobs market in a massive own goal.

Am I mistaken or did the host say both that: 1) The game will release in 3 months 2) The game will release in December (6-7 months)

There are some things that I take issue with in your reporting on this - I am sure they are genuine mistakes BUT: For one, original Prison Architect also had a hidden 3D mode that Introversion was experimenting with - in fact Prison Architect 1 is almost fully 3d, but the camera is locked in such a way that it is not easy to notice. So the fact that Prison Architect 2 is in the 3d world is not surprising The comment about how "The Last Starship", Introversions current Early Access Development title "hasnt sold well" is odd? It's the same as Prison Architect 1, its barely in Alpha currently. It should not be surprising that people have not purchased a game that is fully advertised as incomplete in its current state. Hopefully, it will take off once it is more feature complete just like PA1 did. Like your content, just feel like correcting these items :)

This isn't bizarre at all. It's a common practise in the major companies: take studios for let them produce a new chapter of a fanous game, aquire the IP and then abandon the devs changing them with another one more cheap. In this method they aquire a profitable IP, garantee a sequel pretty finished and then have new devs that cost less money than the old ones.

The games crash is down to avarice. You don't make a successful games company by rushing shit out of the door. Full stop. The real money is in building a brand known for excellence. Rockstar is a good example of this, "its ready when its ready" philosophy. And it has payed dividens for them. Not releasing a game until it is actually good should be a no-brainer for anyone looking to make money.

The main thing people who haven’t play Prison Architect don’t get is, even after all the dlc from paradox, the game is fundamentally broken from what it was meant to be able to do. You can’t have a large prison with + several hundred inmates working with all parts of base games as large parts are just broken due to dlc or ‘fixes’ made by paradox. They have broken it more and more across the years, it is virtually unplayable unless you going for a medium small prison. I spent another 150 hours last year trying to go for a large prison starting from nothing, by 120 hours I had 15 fps with 400 inmates and small constant game breaking bugs that kill any and all enjoyment of the game. It runs like shit, it ain’t fun, nothing works, no mods, idk bout dlc I haven’t spent money on Parasites (paradox) in 4 years. Fuck them. They make my favourite type of games but they can’t actually make them fun / work / or not Extremely expensive. Someone said it best the Euro Truck Sim DLC model is great, you can buy now a lot of DLC w base game for same price as base game on release and several X times more content. No paradox game doubles or triples in size by end of life cycle but will cost 10x that of ETS2. Let them burn.

Paradox: nice game, this is ours now

thx for the report.. they want to save on good developers... then i save on their Game. Removed it from my whislist untill other reports come in.

What happened?

In just feel sad for all the truly hardworking devs and artists... Publishers are just evil.

so in other words just wait and see, seems like the state of triple A gaming now a days

With the shit they have been doing over the last years, I don't feel like giving Paradox any more money. Even with the upcoming Bloodlines 2, though I owned the original Redemption and Bloodlines. When I see that they greedily ask 20€ for Bloodlines when it's not on sale, a 20-year-old game with many bugs, I know enough about this company.

I was looking forward to this game, ah well removed it from my steam wishlist i guess.

going from 2D to 3D inevitably means being able to manage a FEWER number of prisoners which I don't think has been explicitly said. I think they should have split the difference and had paper mario style cut outs.

Speculation: maybe Paradox said, that instead of what the split was agreed on, they want to have bigger cut (lets say it was 50-50 now they want 80%). And if the dev does not like it, they will find one to finish the job. They probably had some provision that basically gave Paradox full control over who developer is. And they found studio that maybe will depend on AI, that will finish very last work and push it out the door. It will be few months of work for the second studio so they would not mind much worse cut. If that would be true, then fk them, they don't deserve a cent from you. But nothing else makes sense.

Having played the original the game the new version doesn't quite sit right with me yet, maybe that is the issue. The art style of the characters isn't quite right or 'gritty' enough for a game of this nature. Making it 3D for 3D sake isn't enough, it needs to bring something else to the table.

Paradox fives off vibes of literally collapsing

its not prison architect if you dont hear the sounds of a broken printer start echoing down the hallway followed by some guy getting his face liquefacted by an armed guard

Paradox are a good dev house that makes great games, but they are terrible publishers.