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I missed out on Fredrik Wester the first time we crossed paths. At Paradox Interactive's 2013 conference, held in a somnambulist Iceland in the middle of winter, Wester did relatively little speaking. 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. 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.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. 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). 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. 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. Wester was louder at the informal gatherings, singing or even playing air guitar, often the last person to talk business.
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 spoke his mind, people said. 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. Yet this was not the Wester I would keep meeting.
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