Introversion Software and Double Eleven’s Prison Architect has become somewhat of a major phenomenon. After racking up some impressive numbers during Early Access, and garnering 1.25 million players between September, 2012 and October, 2015 that amounted to $19 million in sales, they’ve recently announced that Prison Architect has accrued more than 4 million players over the last seven years.
The announcement came via a press release where it was reveled that Double Eleven and Paradox Interactive have teamed up together. Paradox Interactive have also acquired the rights from Double Eleven for Prison Architect.
The news was also accompanied by a video from Double Eleven and Paradox Interactive, while Introversion seems to be out of the loop.
In addition to the rights being acquired by Paradox Interactive, there’s also some additional free updates in tow for PC and home consoles, including the recently released “The Clink” update for the PC version of the game that adds new Guard features, new cosmetics, and the ability to place old objects with different orientations. Four new floor tiles have also been added to the game, along with the quick rooms option being added to the quick build menu so you can very easily and quickly construct rooms on the fly.
Hopefully this acquisition from Paradox Interactive doesn’t include changing up the formula too much, because I can’t see that going down well with gamers. Some titles have a tendency to abandon the old demographic in search of the phantom audience, something that DICE did with Battlefield V, along with studios like Volition Software chasing the phantom crowd with Agents of Mayhem, which netted both titles a spot on the Get Woke; Go Broke – Master List.
Introversion had already announced back in May of 2015 that Prison Architect’s demographic skewed 90% male, so hopefully that doesn’t mean that they’re going to jettison that crowd in an attempt to chase after a demographic that doesn’t exist for the game.
We’ll see how this all turns out with future updates and content patches. For now, you can pick up a digital copy of Prison Architect for Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, mobile devices and on PC.
