It's not often you get to put questions to the man responsible for a broken game your friends just bought so they could play with you, but that's exactly what I did when I spoke with Fredrik Wester, the CEO of Paradox Interactive. Readers commented that our first story sounded personal, and it kind of was. I don't often get a chance to get all my buddies together to play a game, and it was galling when Magicka simply refused to work for any of us.

"We ran the game through two rounds of external QA, one of them dedicated to co-op multiplayer, including hot seat, LAN, and over the Internet. We got a lot of good feedback from the QA team on all forms of co-op," Wester told Ars. "I want to make it perfectly clear: it's obvious not enough was done to fix the online multiplayer part, as it turns out."

Life at Paradox

Paradox Interactive is a busy company. Its 28 employees are working with outside studios to launch 12 games this year. "Paradox also tends to invest in good ideas and people with strong visions, and oftentimes those fresh and new ideas come with less experience," Wester said, listing the many first-time developers they've worked with, including Taleworlds and Nitro Games. "That's kind of our thing now. The risk is always higher working with new studios, but we want to introduce the global gaming community to these teams and their games. While we might encounter challenges, we're convinced that the pros outweigh the negatives at the end of the day."

As the above video illustrates, the game was already delayed past its planned release in spring 2010. The extra time was spent on the tutorial and campaign. "The Internet Connection problems should have been better detected and addressed then, but now have to be fixed after the fact," Wester said.

If you read the comments on our first piece, you'll see how many gamers bought the game and continue to support Paradox. It's a balancing act to keep those gamers playing while assuring those having problems that you're listening. "When you get negative feedback, it will of course cause sales to slow down. On the other hand, we are also getting some good feedback from people who aren't having trouble and they seem to enjoy it a lot," Wester explained.

He's hoping sales continue to pick up once the game is running smoothly for everyone who wants to play. "We will also continue to release content to the gamers and make small changes that are suggested by the fans. I enjoyed this game immensely myself, but I confess to having mostly played it on LAN and local co-op, and that has been running smoothly."

Moving forward, putting out fires

So if Wester could go back in time a week or two with the knowledge of what happened, what call would he have made? "With that advance knowledge, we would have held the release a few weeks to test and fix the connectivity under more realistic circumstances to avoid the situation where people cannot connect properly to games online, instead of being limited to hot seat and LAN to enjoy Magicka," Wester told Ars.

Now the job is clear: fix the game, get people playing, and then the word will spread about the quality of the game itself rather than the bugs. "The development team is working around the clock and we will get this fixed," Wester promised. "We will make this right."