Hooded Horse is kind of eating Paradox’s lunch, and Paradox should be asking themselves why

My favorite new strategy game of 2023 was a roguelike city-builder called Against the Storm, developed by Eremite Games and published by relative newcomer Hooded Horse. This enigmatic equine company came onto the scene in 2019 and has slowly been taking over the indie and mid-budget strategy market that, spiritually, feels like it should be Paradox territory. But it’s not. And I find that very interesting.

When it comes to Paradox, we’ve always been talking about A Tale of Two Companies in my mind, going back to when I started covering them in 2012. There is Paradox Development Studio (which has spun off Paradox Tinto more recently — but you can think of those two as peas in a pod), which makes their first-party grand strategy games like Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Stellaris, and Hearts of Iron. For my money, this is the best strategy development studio (technically studios, at this point) in the world right now.

Then you have Paradox Interactive, the parent company and publisher of everything from Cities: Skylines to the currently shelved Magicka franchise. And in terms of their output, I can’t come up with a more fitting term than “Hit or Miss.” And this has consistently been the case for almost the entire time I’ve been following the company. There were ups and downs, always some diamonds in the rough, but generally I will attend press events excited to hear what PDS is up to, and wondering if I’ll see anything worth raising an eyebrow over from PI.

The reason Hooded Horse has come to loom so large in my mind is that they feel like what I wish Paradox’s publishing arm looked like. I am excited about almost everything they have on their slate. It’s a real dream team of scrappy strategy games I had already been begging people to play, or ended up begging people to play once the publisher turned me onto them.

You have the fantastic ancient world 4X Old World, from Civ 4 designer Soren Johnson. You have the delightful, Eastern Bloc answer to city-builders in Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. You have the old school X-COM spiritual successor Xenonauts 2. You have Manor Lords, a fascinating blend of settlement management and Total War. You have Terra Invicta, probably the best grand strategy game not made by PDS. I fell in love with Paradox playing Crusader Kings II. And Terra Invicta was the first game that made me feel the way I felt the first time I played CK2 since… well, CK2.

And, of course, you have Against the Storm, my strategy game of the year for 2023. These are the types of games that make me, as a strategy enthusiast, drool. They are the ones I can’t wait to tell my strategy enthusiast friends about.

Hooded Horse’s entire portfolio feels like it was hand-picked by strategy enthusiasts, or at least by people who pay attention to what strategy enthusiasts are saying. And that’s really the rub, here. Despite the fact that Paradox Development Studio makes some of the best strategy games of all time, Paradox Interactive’s publishing decisions usually don’t feel like they were made by strategy fans. Hooded Horse seems to get what makes Paradox Development Studio’s first-party games exciting much more than Paradox Interactive does.

And this has been borne out by casual chats I’ve had with some of the shot-callers at Paradox over the years. I don’t think they’re actually that excited about the kinds of strategy games that get PDS fans excited, on a personal level. At least, they don’t come across that way. I’d risk sounding like the worst kind of gatekeeping, gmrgt-steeped, unwashed forum jockey to ask a question like, “How many hours does CEO Fred Wester have in Europa Universalis IV?” So I won’t.

I do know that the games he has been excited to present over the years, such as the platform fighter The Showdown Effect and the deckbuilding roguelite Across the Obelisk — neither of which are terrible games in any regard — have little, in the latter case, or nothing, in the former, to do with the kinds of games PDS players are into. Certainly not to the extent that Hooded Horse’s games scratch those same itches, at least.

And I wouldn’t fault them for casting a bit of a broader net if the strategy games they have published were of a similar quality to the ones from Hooded Horse. But they generally haven’t been. At least, the ratio of hits to misses is significantly worse.

Things had started to look up around the mid-2010s, with some notable hits like Cities: Skylines, Steel Division: Normandy 44, and Battletech. But they were always accompanied by the likes of Surviving Mars, Empire of Sin, and The Lamplighters League, which were either a bit lackluster or suffered from very troubled development.

Lamplighters is the most recent, highly visible example of this, from Hairbrained Schemes, the acclaimed devs of Battletech and the recent Shadowrun CRPGs, all of which were really good. Harebrained apparently had 80% of their staff laid off in July, which may have something to do with why the critical reception of Lamplighters tended to focus on the fact that it felt unfinished. I mean, you tell me. Since then, Harebrained has parted ways with Paradox, apparently over the latter’s refocusing on the strategy niche. Which is interesting, given the criticisms I’ve laid out thus far.

There’s a lot more to be said about Paradox’s identity as a publisher, how going public affected the company, and the brief bout of mania during which they seemed like they were doing a lot of coke (pure speculation) and declaring that they were going to be “bigger than EA.” There are tales to be told of the struggle between those who saw strategy as their focus and those who wanted them to be more of an “Everything” publisher. That’s not within the scope of this article. But maybe I’ll write that one too, some day.

The point I’m making here is that when your output is The Lamplighters League and Cities: Skylines 2, both plagued by difficult launches; when you’re really pushing Across the Obelisk and a game called Foundry that — no shade to the devs, I haven’t met them and haven’t played their game — looks like a very safe Satisfactory-like with an underwhelming feature list…

And across the hall, some guy in a horse mask has Terra Invicta, Against the Storm, Xenonauts 2, Old World, Workers & Resources, and Manor Lords, it kind of looks like you’re getting 360 dunked on, in your own home court. And on top of this, while the nondisclosure grey area of chatting over drinks makes me hesitate to give specific examples, I have been told at least one game on this list was pitched to Paradox… and they passed on it.

At the end of the day, if Paradox’s internal development studio didn’t make Europa Universalis, I think they would have passed on it too. It’s the type of exciting, daring, very special game that they don’t seem interested in taking risks on if it’s not being made in-house. In 2023, it probably would have been a Hooded Horse game. The shot-callers in Paradox publishing look from the outside, to a strategy enthusiast and PDS fan, to be lacking an intimate understanding of what makes those games great, nor does it seem that they are listening to the people who could explain it to them.

I, of course, am not a business person. Maybe the simple fact is that Paradox’s publishing strategy makes more money, even if it doesn’t make better games. I almost said I could not really give a shit about that personally, but I won’t pretend that I’m writing all of this out of pure altruism, that I simply want the games I like to succeed so that I can share those incredible and singular experiences with others. Though that is certainly true.

No, there’s a selfish angle for me here, too. I want the games I like to succeed because I want more of them. I want more of the money that is available to fund games to go toward the types of games Hooded Horse is championing. And you know who has money to make more games like that a reality? Well, Paradox Interactive.

So that’s my fair assessment of the situation. Paradox, Hooded Horse is stunting on you in the strategy publishing game. They are doing what you should be best at better than you ever have, frankly. Are you gonna let that go?

Now, I’m not here to shill for any corpos, no matter how much I like what they’re doing. So I can’t let the Horse go without a little bit of a rap on the knuckles for their bizarre, almost unsettling social media ads that will often present a single screenshot with an ultra generic phrase like “Strategy Game on Steam.” Those certainly don’t help the case that you get it, that you’re strategy fans just like us. If anything, they make me think your entire office has been taken over by SHODAN and I’m staring at the pixels really closely to see if I can find a hidden message that says “PLEASE KILL ME.” So, you know, there’s some constructive feedback. Getting more clicks, in my weighing of the scales, isn’t really worth it if it makes you seem impersonal and off-putting. But you do you.