Paradox Interactive announces new Magicka expansion, A Game of Dwarves and Napoleons Campaigns II

At the Paradox Interactive Convention 2012 held in Sweden, the independent publisher/developer announced a handful of new games, including a new expansion for Magicka called "The Other Side of the Coin." Magicka is the publisher’s most successful franchise to date, having sold more than 1.3 million units and more than 4 million in DLC content. Developed by Arrowhead Game Studios, Magicka is a PC action RPG and the latest expansion will put you in the shoes of Alucard the vampire and his necromancer henchmen.

Next up for Paradox is A Game of Dwarves, a quirky, isometric strategy management game where you control an entire team of dwarves as they explore, dig, eat, sleep, drink across randomly generated maps. It’s being developed for the PC, Mac and PlayStation Network and is going to be available later this year.

To wrap things up with something a little more serious, the final game announcement was Napoleon’s Campaigns II for the PC and Mac later this year. Developed by Paradox’s studio in France, it’s a strategy game focused on the Napoleonic era.

During Paradox Interactive’s press conference, CEO Fred Wester admitted to bumpy releases and broken promises from last year’s convention, but he promised (again) that one of Paradox’s priorities is to support post-release content.

He also announced a re-branding of their internal studio, now called Paradox Development Studios and that they opened another studio called Paradox North that will focus on online games. The publisher is also helping local talent create games by giving young game designers office space and the tools needed to get their game off the ground. The incubator program is to encourage independent developers and get them on their feet.

Wester also went over the recent trends such as the growing number of tablets, and believes that the next generation of consoles may be the last. With Smart TVs and the ability to stream content off the internet, there may not be a need for consoles in the future.

“The new generation of consoles coming out in a year, or two years, is probably going to be the last generation,” Wester said, “I’d be very surprised if we see a generation after that.. A CPU integrated into a TV is a much smarter way of working instead of having the hardware connected to the TV. It’s only a matter of time, before we will see the consoles totally wiped out of the market.”

What do you think? Will there be a need for console hardware in the future when we have the technology to stream everything off Onlive?