[3] Between 2000 and 2003, Paradox Entertainment released the first titles of several grand strategy games, including Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun, and Crusader Kings.

[4] By around 2003, Paradox Entertainment began buying the intellectual property rights to various franchises like Conan the Barbarian from Robert E. Howard and Solomon Kane.

The Paradox Entertainment executives did not take this advice well and decided it would be better to shutter the video games division and focus exclusively on licensing their acquired brands.

Their publisher, Strategy First, filed for bankruptcy about two months into its release, costing Paradox revenues from those sales as well as the lack of a North American distributor.

[7] Colossal Order ultimately wanted to produce a city simulation game to challenge Electronic Arts SimCity series but Paradox had expressed concerns regarding the competition.

Obsidian, having struggled financially, crowd-sourced the development of a new game, Pillars of Eternity, and entered into a publishing deal for it through Paradox.

[12] In March 2016, CEO Fredrik Wester stated in an interview with Di Digital that Paradox Interactive had launched the IPO process.

The company stated their intention to complete this process within a year, with the goal of spreading ownership between employees and players of their games and "looking for long-term owners who want to take part in the Paradox journey".

The move was billed as giving Wester more ability to look for growth opportunities while Ljungerud handled the day-to-day operations of the company, which had since grown to about 300 employees since its foundation.

[27] According to Wester, the company's focus remains on their strategy and simulation games, and that they have "sharpened our pipeline further to ensure that the projects with the highest potential have the resources necessary for the best possible development".

Paradox replied to these reports that while the prior survey was too small a fraction of their total employee count to take action on, they have hired an independent auditor to review their company culture, starting with their Sweden operations.

[31] Paradox operates five internal studios:[32][33] Paradox is the publisher of its internally developed single and multi-player grand strategy games series; Imperator: Rome, Crusader Kings III, Europa Universalis IV, Victoria 3, Hearts of Iron IV, and Stellaris.

[35] During PDXCON Remixed, Paradox announced a kickstarter of a Prison Architect board game, designed by Noralie Lubbers and David Turczi.

The online event features game-related announcements, previews of upcoming Paradox Interactive games and content, Q&A sessions and panels.

On May 11, 2020, Paradox tweeted stating they have teamed up with Guerrilla Collective to be a part of their digital multi-day gaming pressing conference indie studios and smaller publishers.

Grand strategy games are often played on a real-world map, marked by the use of standard real-time elements but with an ability to make any and all changes even while paused.

The focus of each game is different, but generally a player must manage the economy, commerce, internal politics, diplomacy, technological development, and military forces of a nation.

[5] The period from 2011 to 2014 was marked by the publication of the first Magicka game in 2011, itself having been greenlit for publishing after seeing the success of the Mount & Blade series in 2008, which did not quite fit their grand strategy profile.

A Paradox spokesman said this was "an affordable way for players to experience the entire Crusader Kings 2 catalogue without having to weigh which items they would prefer to purchase".

To assist modders to figure out how to edit the game on their own, the Paradox forums provide fan-compiled libraries of "how to" advice.

[48] Paradox Interactive purchased White Wolf Publishing's assets, including World of Darkness and Vampire: The Masquerade, from CCP Games in October 2015.

[51][52] In November 2018, as a result of backlash generated by material pertaining to "murder of gay Chechens" published in a Vampire: The Masquerade Fifth Edition source book, it was announced that White Wolf would no longer function as an entity separate from its parent company, and would cease developing and publishing products internally.

The acquisition was considered to be a good fit by both commentators and the involved companies, based on similarities in product genres and corporate culture.

[58] Paradox Interactive acquired Harebrained Schemes, the maker of Shadowrun Returns and the Paradox-published game BattleTech, in June 2018 for a fixed price of US$7,500,000 and 25% of the earnings of Harebrained Schemes excluding publishing cost in the next 5 years, to the extent they exceed the fixed purchasing price.

[32] In January 2019, Paradox acquired the intellectual property rights to the Prison Architect series from developer Introversion Software, with plans to continue to expand more games in the same theme.