As an example, in the upcoming Hearts of Iron IV, which covers the years around World War II, you can select “historical accuracy” to have the various factions controlled by the computer to play as close as possible to what actually happened.

Going IPO means being able to raise a lot of money to… Expand. What will a company like Paradox do with that money?

I see a few different opportunities, and I’m going to briefly describe them below:

Education Artificial Intelligence Technical training

1. Education

It is very clear to me that, besides the typical “gamer” that is interested in “difficult to master” strategy games, there’s an opportunity to attract someone else: a student, and not just a student of history.

Paradox has, in fact, the opportunity to create a platform that schools and universities can use to both teach students about history, technology, engineering, while having fun playing games.

Imagine the game above, Hearts of Iron IV, and how many opportunities there are to learn things: an Engineering student can learn how radio technology works and then see its effects when you discover how to apply that technology to your troops; or an Economics student could learn how commerce, resources and logistics are the main forces behind who wins or loses a war.

The right platform would allow students (and in turn, professors) to build “content” that infiltrates the game without ruining it, but also a way to “score” your learning within the game itself — and possibly, get “bonuses” in the game if you learn things properly.

We have been hearing about the “gamification” of education for a while, but I haven’t seen any clearer opportunity than this one.

I have been involved with education startups in the past (such as CloudAcademy.com, which offers training and tests for cloud computing skills — mostly on Amazon Web Services at the moment) and I can assure you that whoever finds a more engaging way to retain the student’s attention, wins BIG.

2. Artificial Intelligence

There are thousands of games published every year, and each one of them needs some sort of Artificial Intelligence (even though the term is sometimes improperly used), or AI, to play the computer “adversaries” or characters in the game.

In most cases, the AI is worse than a good human player, and this is a pity because these games would be much more fun and engaging (and challenging) if game studios had the time and budget to build better AIs.