![]() ![]() He's great at rallying people and people are happy to follow him." Meza Graham has worked alongside Wester for a decade, during which she's seen Paradox grow from around 20 people to 180. "I feel like people get very motivated around him. "He's always very full of energy," she says. What this is, Meza Graham explains to me over a Skype call, is a manifestation of Wester's drive, his desire to always be busy doing something. Both of us realise, within two minutes, this isn't going to happen, but we've got half an hour and we have to sit through it. A developer's flown all the way out to Stockholm. It can be very awkward in business meetings where we're getting something pitched to us. If anything slows down, the phone comes up. "We're trying to work on his attention span," Jorjani continues. Crusader Kings 2, one of Paradox Interactive's breakout successes. This was a man I could imagine bouncing from meeting to meeting, hungry for stimulation. During that discussion, however, I couldn't help but notice him toying with his phone, checking the time, tapping at something or other. Once more, Wester has often been deferential, though he's spoken at length during the event's opening and also at a round table discussion where no topic was out of bounds. Again, the company is presenting a diverse portfolio to journalists, from the sequel to Magicka through to the grand strategy of Hearts of Iron 4 and the soon-to-be-megasuccess of Cities: Skylines. Jorjani is answering questions about his boss two years later, in the chilly, converted hotel-prison that Paradox has occupied for its 2015 conference. Then, he'll walk about the Paradox office, spot a meeting, say 'That's an interesting meeting, what's that about?' and jump right in. He sits down, he does a tonne of emails, but all his emails are very short. "He starts his day by putting on headphones and listening to opera. "A normal day with Fred?" says Jorjani, chewing over the question. Yet this was not the Wester I would keep meeting. Wasn't it refreshing that he sidestepped the PR machine to give a little dig at his rivals, or wasn't it amusing that he accidentally let a game announcement slip early? The impression one particular, smirking journalist gave was of an impulsive eccentric, slightly off-balance in his world, perhaps surprised at his own success and always on the verge of the next misstep. ![]() What I'd known of Wester at that point came mostly through other games journalists and from occasional very frank tweets that had become infamous. Wester was louder at the informal gatherings, singing or even playing air guitar, often the last person to talk business. ![]() But, while so many of the decisions that had brought them that momentum came from Wester, it was often colleagues like Susana Meza Graham, Paradox's COO, or Shams Jorjani, the company's VP of acquisition, who did much of the talking. Both Magicka and Crusader Kings 2 had been huge recent successes and, despite the disastrous failures of concurrent games like Gettysburg and Sword of the Stars 2, the Swedish publisher had tremendous momentum. That year was not a date chosen arbitrarily, but the year that Wester had founded the digital distribution platform Gamersgate and begun the tremendous shift that would see Paradox eventually earn 98-99 per cent of its sales online (Gamersgate is now an entirely independent company, but still carried the Paradox catalogue up until very recently). It was not what you might expect from the man at the helm of a company who, Forbes had just said, were enjoying 1000 per cent growth in gross revenue since 2006. He didn't speak for anyone, didn't seem to have any need to assert himself and, as I realise in retrospect, seemed to spend a great deal of his time just listening. While the development teams present showed off a diverse roster of games like Cities in Motion 2, Leviathan: Warships and Impire, Paradox's commander-in-chief was content to let them advocate for their own work. At Paradox Interactive's 2013 conference, held in a somnambulist Iceland in the middle of winter, Wester did relatively little speaking. I missed out on Fredrik Wester the first time we crossed paths. ![]()
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